School Nursing Service in Lothian – A Guide for Education, Social and Health Care Professionals This leaflet is a guide for agencies and staff working with school age children and explains the new role for the school nursing team and the kind of services that will be provided.
All the team contacts details can be found in this leaflet on page 10.
Who is the NHS team for School Age Children?
- GP – all regular family health care
- CAMHS – Child and Adolescent Mental Health – Specialist Service
- Hospital Paediatric – medical/surgical and other specialist services
- Community Paediatrician – doctors in community child health
- CCN Team – Community Children’s Nurses – specialist paediatric trained nurses
- AHPs – Allied Health Professionals – speech and language therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dietetics, orthoptics – referral based service
- CVT – Community Vaccination Team – nurses who deliver vaccination services to all age groups
- Learning Disability Services – where there is LD diagnosis
- Oral Health – Dental – prevention and treatment service
- LAC Nurses – Looked After Children – nurses who work only with looked after children. When notified by Social Work that a child has become looked after, the LAC nurses will undertake a health assessment. They may refer to school nursing for ongoing reviews and wider support.
All about school nursing – see New School Nursing Role
Who Can Refer and How?
Children and young people can be referred to the School Nurse by their school, their GP or other health care professional. A request for assistance (referral) form has been created and will commence from August 2018.
This will be completed and sent electronically by secure email to the cluster school nurse team.
These forms will be available via all school offices and GP practices, but can also be found at: school nursing service request for assistance form.
The School Nurse will assess the referral and decide if the referral is appropriate and liaise back on next steps.
If the referral is appropriate and the nurse has capacity on her/his caseload, the School Nurse will take the child onto their caseload and undertake assessment and any appropriate intervention (e.g. LIAM – Low Intensity Anxiety Management) for a time limited intervention period. We will monitor the level of referrals and trends to ensure that our nurses work at safe workload levels and to best explore the ongoing health needs of the school age population.
The child would be discharged once an intervention had been completed and the child was considered well enough to be supported via universal systems. For children will ongoing vulnerability, the School Nurse would continue to support where appropriate working with the team around the child.
Children and young people can also self refer. They can do this by discussing this at drop ins or asking their teacher/ guidance teacher to refer them. Parents can refer by discussing with their GP or child’s teacher/ guidance teacher.
*Secure emails to and from @nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk:
- @edinburgh.gov.uk
- @eastlothian.gov.uk
- @midlothian.gov.uk
- @westlothian.gov.uk
- @nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk
- @nhs.net
School emails are not on secure public services network – but each school office should have a “@gov.uk” which the referring teacher should send the form via.
How is information used by the school nurse – Data Protection?
The School Nursing Team, as part of NHS Lothian staff, follow all NHS policies and procedures on information sharing, confidentiality, data protection and consent. As a professional working in the team around the child using the Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC) practice development model, the school nurse will work in the interagency team.
School Nurses use child health records and NHS Lothian electronic record keeping system called TRAK.
Healthcare Needs of Children with Moderate to Complex Physical Nursing Needs:
- For children in Complex Needs Schools, nursing care needs will be delivered by the nursing team who are based in these designated schools
