What do school nurses do?

FROM TOPIX: anonymous Saint Marys, GA Reply » Report Abuse Judge it! #2 Friday Feb 20 What about the fact that we are spending $672,095.00 + benefits for 16 school nurses. No wonder Perdue is talking about no longer funding this. He said the same job could be carried out by a paraprofessional for 1/3 of the cost. ye heard Saint Marys, GA Reply » Report Abuse Judge it! #68 42 min ago Birdy wrote: what do the nurses do? hold a rag on the cut until the ambulance gets there,,,,,,,,,ye heard The, uh, folks, over on TOPIX are now trashing the need for school nurses. Well, I'm sure that school nurses do much I'm not aware of, but here are some things I know they do. For one thing, if a kid needs to take medications on a regular basis, or even, say, antibiotics for an episodic illness, they are not allowed to carry them on their persons and take them on their own. Their meds have to be checked at the nurses office, then administered by the nurse. This includes injectables in some cases. I'm talking anything from aspirin to neuroleptics. There is a zero tolerance for the kids self-administering. When kids take sick in school, the nurses do the triaging and decide whether the parents need to be called to come get the children. Trust me: they are very busy this time of the year. When kids are injured horsing around, the nurses deal with that (followed by the disciplinarians). Nurses give visual acuity exams. Nurses assist young ladies with unexpected feminine emergencies. In the event of an older staff member having a heart attack, the nurses would be on scene before the EMTs could get there. Ditto in the rare event of a kid going down with a seizure or whatever. In short, as an ex-Chief Hospital Corpsman, I think that the idea of replacing the nurses with lesser trained and possibly unlicensed individuals, as proposed by the governor, is a very bad idea. Oh, and I'm sure they are involved in records of immunizations, as well.