There is something powerful about walking the halls of Congress with a clear purpose, knowing exactly why you’re there and exactly who you’re fighting for. I’ve had the privilege of doing that year after year as the National Association of Nurses (NASN) Director from New Jersey.  This year, I did it for the last time in this… Continue reading The Relentless School Nurse: My Last Hill Day – A Reflection on Advocacy, Purpose, and the Work That Matters

  Grandparents for Vaccines is featured in Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper in an article written by journalist Meghan Rabbitt titled They Remember a World Without Vaccines. I was interviewed for the article along with Donna Gaffney, and much of our conversation centered on the role storytelling plays in public health and why grandparents telling their… Continue reading The Relentless School Nurse: Grandparents for Vaccines Featured in Maria Shriver’s “Sunday Paper”

    We inherited a profession that other school nurses built.Now we are responsible for sustaining it. But that is not something most of us understand when we first become school nurses. Most of us enter school nursing focused on learning the job. We learn how to manage medications, respond to emergencies, write care plans,… Continue reading The Relentless School Nurse: Sustaining the Profession We Inherited

If you ask school nurses what the most pressing issue in our profession is right now, you will hear many answers. Staffing shortages. Student mental health. Workload. Burnout. Documentation. Delegation. Funding. School safety. Increasing medical complexity. All of these are real, and all of them deserve attention. But they are not the whole story. The… Continue reading The Relentless School Nurse: The Most Pressing Issue in School Nursing Is Not What People Think

How a Sugar Cube, a Vaccine, and a Generation of Parents Helped End Polio There is a song that most of us can hear in our heads the moment we read the title. Julie Andrews, standing in the nursery in Mary Poppins, is singing about how a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.… Continue reading The Relentless School Nurse: More Than a Spoonful of Sugar