School Nurses

About the department

Our School Nurses, part of the Health Visiting Team, deliver the Healthy Child Programme for children aged 5–19 years and their families who reside in Buckinghamshire. The programme offers four levels of intervention to describe the ongoing support that the children and young people can expect to improve their health and wellbeing: community universal, universal plus and universal partnership plus with safeguarding across all levels.

We work in partnership with other services such as maternity, primary care, early years, social care, and mental health services. Overall, the service is about improving public health outcomes for children, young people and their families.

What makes it a great place to work? Work colleagues, a great team who are friendly and caring.

About the role

School nurses work across education and health, providing a link between school, home and the community.

This widely varied role makes it exciting and a typical day includes facilitating good team working, identifying vulnerable children and carrying out health assessments to address their needs and working closely with other professionals and agencies. You will be responsible for areas of delivery within the team, including nocturnal enuresis clinics, childhood continence issues, NCMP, vision screening and hearing tests. You could be providing emotional health and wellbeing support to individuals, school health advice clinics for secondary school age children as well as advising schools on their public health agendas.

The most obvious benefit of working as a school nurse is having the chance to work with children and young people. You can have a very real and positive impact on a child’s life just by doing your job.

Career routes

You would need to be a registered nurse (Child/Adult/LD/Mental health).

You would then need to apply to undertake the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing (SCPHN – School Nursing) degree course with a Trust and obtain a place at university and successfully complete the course.