Health Services

About the Health Services Department

A District School Nurse is a Registered Nurse (RN) that has a Baccalaureate degree or above, have additional post-graduate education related to school health issues, and have a School Nurse Health Services Credential through the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. 

School nurses are the primary health care providers within the educational environment, promoting optimum health status, physical, mental and emotional health, so all students may achieve their fullest potential as a learner and a person.

District School Nurses: 

• Act as the link between health and education to create a culture and climate that promotes student-centered learning.
• Provide health care as the District’s only credentialed, licensed, qualified health professional for students, staff, and parents.
• Use nursing process and assessment skills to make a nursing diagnosis based on clinical judgment in all areas, including emergency care.
• Interpret medical orders, medical reports, and medical technology.
• Provide a link between home and school, school and the medical community, hospital and school.
• Provide problem solving techniques for complex medical and ethical issues such as safe medication administration by students with diabetes, asthma, and emergency medication carried on their persons.
• Provide communicable disease control including immunizations, referrals, follow-up for students and staff.
• Provide Health and Developmental histories for assessment of increasingly complex medical issues of our students. 
• Assess and monitor accommodations for handicapped students accommodation, including the classroom environment, safe lifting and transfer techniques.
• Complete the legal mandates of vision screening, hearing screening, scoliosis screening, the subsequent referrals and follow-up.
• Advocate for child health through medical case management, crisis intervention and triage, seeing that each child is in optimum health to learn.
• Act as risk manager for compliance with legal health mandates, and maintain standards of safe practice throughout the District.
• Train and monitor staff medication administration, including daily Insulin. This also includes the administration of emergency medications Epipen and Glucagon.  
• Evaluate the possible side effects and interactions of approximately 65 different medications and their impact on student learning and behavior.
• Develop, implement and supervise Specialized Health Care Plans for medically fragile students who may be full inclusion students.
• Orient and supervise staff carrying out health care procedures which may include catheterization, diabetic monitoring, gastrostomy feedings, and emergency care response procedures.  Provide backup care when regular staff are absent.
• Provide education and consultation to students, staff, and parents on health, nutrition, special health care needs of children, accessing health care, self health care, being a health care consumer, domestic violence, and safe school environment.

🔗PVSD Staff Training Handouts

         (must sign into PVSD Google account)