A different type of lice question

Do you document head checks in the students record? I have a few teachers that send kids to me frequently when she sees them scratch. Should I be documenting those checks as a clinic visit? Thx in advance for your sage advice.

take credit for the visit..if I touch a child, I document it.

I always do. Your time is valuable and unfortunately a lot of that time is spent checking heads. I look at it as job security- at the end of the year I submit a report with all my visits to the state. Hope this helps.

Agree with the above comments. Concrete data for how many students you see and why really come in handy if your district ever decides they don't need (as many) school nurses anymore!

I document just about every kid that comes thru my doors. I may miss a bandaid here or there but I pretty much document everything. I see it as job security.

Several years ago I worked at a hospital that was doing alot of rearranging of staff and job duties. They hired a company to come in that had us basically keep track of every single thing we did during the day for a week - after they got the results back several people ended up being without a job or were transferred to other departments etc because of the information they gathered during that week. Ever since then - if I need to document something I do.

[NutmeggeRN, BSN]

I document everything, visits, telephone call, discussions with staff members, 504 planning time, 504 meeting time ALL of it!!

If ya didn't chart it, ya didn't do it.

Yes but for head checks we have a worksheet with student's name at top then boxes for the date, symptoms (itching, lice, nits) and action (excluded, back to class) so that it's quick and easy to document and easy to keep track of how often they're checked, have lice, etc.

Here are a couple of lice tracking forms that I made up. If they would be helpful to anyone, I would like to share them. Sorry they are only in PDF. My computer crashed a while back and these weren't saved on my flash drive. I had shared them with another school nurse website, and had to go retrieve them from there.

Happy Tuesday-

a.

Lice_tracking_sheet_family_unit.pdf

LicetrackingsheetSingle Child.pdf

I would imagine that like most school nurse sites, head lice is probably a little divisive.

When you look at a child's head you are inspecting the scalp and the hair. I am always happy to do that. I do see head lice, nits new and old, ezcema, etc.

It behooves all of us to remember that head lice is a pretty unimportant health care problem among children. My personal mantra is: Head lice don't cause anything but consternation.

Document, document, document. You did the work so take the credit for it. This way when the school system decides they need to cut some more out of the budget, it won't be you.