The School Nurse Practitioner Program

Abstract

The school nurse practitioner program is a new educational and training program in pediatric health care for professional nurses which prepares school nurses to assume an expanded role in providing improved health care to school-aged children. School nurses will be prepared to offer comprehensive well-child care and to identify and assess the factors that may operate to produce learning disorders, psychoeducational problems, perceptive-cognitive difficulties, and behavior problems as well as those causing physical disease. The school will serve as a principal setting for comprehensive primary and continuing health care and services since it is the one place where children between the ages of 5 and 18 years are regularly and readily accessible. Effective utilization of nurses in a school setting could result in a major modification of the present health-care system.