The Arizona Department of Education implemented the Arizona School Nurse Access Program in May to address the shortage of school nurses across Arizona.
The Arizona School Nurse Access Program (ASAP) is a multifaceted program that aims to recruit and hire more school nurses, increase the number of competently trained and board-certified school nurses as well as provide mentorship to new school nurses.
With the support of grant funding from the Arizona Department of Health Services provided by the Centers for Disease Control, the Arizona Department of Education was able to create this new program.
“The grant is allowing schools that don’t typically have the funds, to hire a nurse,” said Melinda Weible, ASAP director at the Arizona Department of Education. “Schools are able to offer a competitive salary and receive funds to start their own health office. By providing the funding to create a school nurse position, registered nurses can have the opportunity to work as school nurses in remote communities that they reside in.”
ASAP will be adding up to 60 school nurses in schools throughout Arizona that are primarily in rural, remote and underserved communities, according to the organization’s website.
“We have already hired six nurses and some of them already started to work in the schools already and are developing those relationships,” Weible said. “They are also signing up for (school nursing) classes that we have available for them so that they’ll be ready to go next school year.”
Schools in the rural areas of the U.S. are “significantly more likely” than schools in urban areas to report having no nurse at all, with 23.5% of rural schools reporting not having a nurse compared with 10.3% of urban schools, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of School Nursing.
“It’s critical everywhere right?” said Dick Foreman, president and CEO of Arizona Business and Education Coalition. “We have so much data from so many different sources and it all corroborates the same bottom line and that is health care is in a critical shortage, for probably a generation, so it’s going to take some time to attract students to properly educate them and give them the opportunity.”
When it comes to school nursing education and competency, ASAP also provides funding for new nurses to take school nursing classes at Maricopa County Community Colleges. The classes they can take include diabetic assessment of school-age children, recognition of common skin rashes in school-aged children, school nurse emergency assessment and response skills, immunization protocols and more.
“Maricopa County Community Colleges have created this really robust curriculum of school nursing classes,” said Sarah Portle, program manager for the Arizona School Nurse Access Program. “These classes are focusing on the fundamentals of school nursing.”
ASAP is also dedicated to increasing the number of school nurses certified by the National Board for Certification of School Nurses through ASAP’s National Certified School Nurse Program (NCSN).
While there are over 200 school nurses in Arizona, there are only 30 nationally certified school nurses in the state of Arizona, Portle said.
ASAP’s NCSN will be supporting at least 40 Arizona school nurses in successfully obtaining their national school nurse certification, with the goal being to certify 20 Arizona school nurses in 2022 and 20 more nurses in 2023.
For those accepted in ASAP’s NCSN program, ASAP will cover the cost of each applicant in seeking and obtaining their national school nurse certification, including study materials and the exam fee. On top of that, the program provides an online support forum, virtual study group sessions, review courses and more.
Through ASAP’s mentor program, experienced school nurses are partnered with newly hired school nurses to increase new school nurse job satisfaction and the ability to demonstrate core competencies as well as reduce burnout.
If there is no school nurse on campus to care for a child with a chronic condition like asthma or seizures, parents are less likely to send their child to school, which can greatly impact their learning, according to Portle. “The best learners are healthy learners and having a school nurse on campus really ensures that these kiddos are healthy to learn optimally,” Portle said.
The implementation of more school nurses increases accessibility to health care in rural communities throughout Arizona.
“Another benefit that we learned through ongoing conversations with administrators in these remote schools is that, for some communities, health care is not within reach within the community and so having a school nurse in some cases may be the only health care or health attention that these students get,” Weible said.
Portle said she hopes ASAP inspires other states to adopt similar programs to address the lack of school nurses across the country.
“The goal is to move this nationally,” Portle said. “If we can prove really great outcomes and if we can really show what we’re doing, we can help not only Arizona school kids but we can help school kids across the country.”
Contact the reporter at mlok1@asu.edu.
