School Nursing

The Relentless School Nurse: An Important Request from Academy Award Winning Filmmaker, Rayka Zehtabchi 

Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, FNASN, FAAN

This is an important opportunity for school nurses to contribute our perspective and school-level experiences with period equity and the role of the school nurse.  Early in the pandemic, I wrote about the award winning documentary, Period. End of Sentence with a link to open access film: The Relentless School Nurse: It’s Time For Period Equity. Period. The film’s director, Rayka Zehtabchi, reached out to Holly David from School Nursing Facebook page and shared the following request:

Dear School Nurses:

I am the filmmaker behind the Academy-Award winning documentary, Period. End of Sentence., which is centered on a group of women in Northern India who start a business making and selling sanitary pads to combat the stigma around menstruation and create access to pads for the women in their community.

I was speaking with the heads of The Pad Project (non-profit org that I’m a board member of) and we were all trying to brainstorm how the org could help to bring more funding/access to menstrual hygiene products in schools. We thought it might be really effective to conduct a survey to get some more data on what the needs might be across the country. It would be immensely helpful to hear from nurses themselves.

Thank you for your time, and more importantly, thank you for the valuable work that you do as a nurse!

– Rayka Zehtabchi 

 

Click link below to fill out the survey:

Published by Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, FNASN, FAAN

Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, FNASN, FAAN, is a Nationally Certified School Nurse (NCSN), currently in her 22nd year as a New Jersey school nurse in the Camden City School District. Robin is the Director for New Jersey to the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) Board. She is proud to be a Johnson & Johnson School Health Leadership Fellow and past Program Mentor. Robin is the honored recipient of multiple awards for her work in school nursing and population health. These awards include, 2019 and 2020 National Association of School Nurses President’s Award, 2018 NCSN School Nurse of the Year, 2017 Johnson & Johnson School Nurse of the Year, and the New Jersey Department of Health 2017 Population Health Hero Award. Robin serves as faculty in the School Nurse Certificate Program at Rutgers University-Camden School of Nursing, where she teaches the next generation of school nurses. She was presented the 2018 Rutgers University – Camden Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award for Part-time Faculty. Robin writes a weekly blog called The Relentless School Nurse. She also writes a monthly column in My American Nurse, the official journal of the American Nurses Association. Robin’s work is included as a case study in The Future of Nursing Report 2020-2030. You can follow Robin on Twitter at @RobinCogan.

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