This blog post is a celebration of school nurses who were given an impossible task and turned it into something remarkable.  Let's be honest about what we ask of school nurses. We place one clinician in a building or multiple buildings of hundreds of children, sometimes over a thousand, and expect them to be fully… Continue reading The Relentless School Nurse: Your Job Description is Impossible. You Do it Anyway.

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