The Relentless School Nurse: #AmplifyNursing

In July 2017, I took a blogging workshop at the NASN Conference in San Francisco with Margaret Cellucci, NASN’s former Director of Communication. It was like a moon shot for me because it freed me to do something that I had hoped to do for years, become a blogger. The workshop was a nuts and bolts approach to blogging made easy and it gave me the tools I needed to start writing.

The purpose of my blog, the Relentless School Nurse, is to amplify the voice of school nursing through storytelling.  My blog will celebrate its 2nd birthday on July 4, 2019. That was the day I wrote my very first blog. Since that day, I have published a new post weekly. In fact, I have published 196 posts, some are with guest bloggers who have contributed to the Relentless School Nurse. Almost 20,000 visitors have read my posts over the past two years. I have had visitors from the US and abroad.  The analytics are interesting, most of the visitors have been through Facebook, followed by Twitter and then web searches.

If you are attending NASN19 in Denver this summer, please join Margaret Cellucci and me as we share information with the next group of potential school nurse bloggers on June 30th from 12:45 – 2:45. Our workshop is entitled: Amplify the Voice of School Nursing Through Blogging & Social Media.  I look forward to sharing my social media journey of advocacy, activism and finding my school nursing voice through this interactive workshop. You will walk away with a story to publish either as a guest blogger on The Relentless School Nurse, or better yet, through your own platform.

We have entered a new age of advocacy & yes, I will use the word, activism. Nurses are no longer sitting in silence when we see what is unjust, unfair and broken. Our voices are included in boardrooms, C-Suites, classrooms and in the halls of Congress. We are learning to “no longer tolerate the intolerable”, as I recently heard Dr. Erin Maughan, NASN Director of Research, remind New Jersey school nurses at our spring conference.

When 4 million nurses speak, the country will listen. Our unique perspective is important, our assessment skills needed and most urgently, our sheer numbers can shift policy when we unite in a shared purpose. We should not only unite when we feel disrespected, or as Beth Toner wrote recently, “Outrage is not a strategy.”

We can unite over big issues that impact the health and well being of our nation. We can unite over children being separated from their parents at our borders, or the epidemic of gun violence that permeates our society. We can unite over the unmet needs of our most vulnerable populations, our children and elderly. We can unite over structural inequities, racism, poverty, hunger, homelessness, the opioid crisis, human trafficking, abuse, trauma, and no longer tolerate the intolerable. We can unite, we have no other choice. Our lives and the lives of those we care for and about depend on it.