NicoleRNGonzaga

Thank you for the feedback! It seems we have a wide variety of different methods situations. One nurse per school would be wonderful and I think high school would be easier from the med administration perspective (oh, but not from the hormonal one!) We live in one of the poorest communities in Washington state and as such our funding is very poor. One thing that's done here is there is one elementary school with a full time nurse where most diabetics and complex needs kids go. She's in charge of 50 pretty high needs kids. We rely on our unions many times to push legislation through but school nurses here are represented by the teachers union. I just fear fear it's going to take a mistake with fatal consequences to get our laws safer for students and nurses. Why do I always choose projects this complex? I'm jealous of my classmate who is try to change hospital policy about pre-op shaving.

That's interesting! I'm in Washington state, where it is delegated. A whole can of worms in my opinion! The delegating nurse is in charge of their UAP's training, which is good. But we kind of have revolving door nurses and very little time to do additional training.

Hello! I'm in grad school and for my current course I have to identify an area needing improvement in an institution and address it using Positive Deviance. My topic is medication administration in public schools. Locally, I am finding it hard to get "official" data regarding medication errors. I am however, very close to a number of school nurses. Unofficially, I have heard stories ranging from overdosing, poor record keeping, wrong student given meds, meds not being given at all, forged records and a whole host of other issues. The big concern my friends have is that there are 5 full time RNs for 20 schools. Unlicensed assistive personnel are trained and signed off by a nurse, who delegates the medication administration to that person. And then of course eats the liability. It's not working well in our district and my brilliant friends are attempting to solve it hands on, but for my assignment I am to seek out other districts who have similar resources and are doing it well with few errors and protocols in place. The idea of Positive Deviance is to fine unusual methods or work arounds which have been adapted by peers to make med administration safe. So, if you work in a district with a bad ratio of nurses to students, how do you safely make sure medications are administered. And if you don't, do you have out of the box ideas we could present? Thanks so much!