School Nurses: A ‘Hidden Health Care System’ Finds a Voice

A blog is born.

Five years ago, I attended a blog writing workshop at the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) annual conference. It was led by Margaret Cellucci, the former director of communications for NASN. The hands-on workshop was a primer on blogging and included an assignment that the participants needed to submit a blog post about their conference experience before the end of the event. That is how The Relentless School Nurse blog was born. Five years, 818 blog posts, and almost 400,000 views later, I can say with confidence that school nursing is a vibrant and innovative specialty practice.

Amplifying the voice of school nursing.

My aim has been to amplify the voice of school nursing. At first, I focused on sharing stories from my health office. But soon I wanted to spotlight school nurses from around the country who were doing amazing things but did not have a national platform to share their experiences. As my readership grew, so did my reach and within a short time, I was highlighting school nurses from coast to coast.

To tell our own stories—not to boast but to educate.

Recognition in school nursing, like in most nursing, has been hard-fought, both within our own walls and outside as well. So […]

2022-05-11T10:32:27-04:00May 11th, 2022|COVID-19, Nursing, school nurses|1 Comment
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What’s New on the Nursing Blogs?

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

Matthew Bowden/Wikimedia Commons

So what’s new on the nursing blogs. I’ve been checking around today, and here are a few good things I’ve found so far. Please let me know if there are any really new and lively nursing blogs we should add to our nursing blogs page. We need some new voices, and I’m sure they’re out there.

Burnout. At Nursing in Hawaii (this blog changes its name periodically to reflect the current location of its peripatetic owner), we find a pretty interesting and roundabout kind of post, “Nurse Burnout, Reality Shock, Marlene Kramer,” that addresses the stages of nurse burnout in a really useful and practical way (after discussing an early seminal book on the topic, what this has to do with the development of the Magnet program, and a few other items). Here’s an excerpt, but I’d suggest reading the whole thing for a look at this seemingly universal issue for nurses.

the honeymoon. This is where the new nurse is still being oriented and everything is wonderful. The preceptor is so smart! The staff is amazing! The paycheck is HUGE! we all love to be around such a person and delight in the innocence of youth.

crash and burn. the onset of this is hard to predict, but usually about the six-month mark. Takes place when the nurse starts getting feedback from every direction, not […]

2016-11-21T13:09:27-05:00August 22nd, 2012|nursing perspective|2 Comments
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A Note on the Life Cycle of Blogs

This is just to say that we realize that personal blogs by nurses have life cycles. They wax and they wane. While a core few are updated consistently, with the occasional gap for a vacation, and live on and on, evolving their appearances or keeping the old reliable appearance, many more simply die a quiet natural death. In many cases, no one plays taps. They served their purpose, they were noticed by a few or many of us, and then they quietly grew quiet.

Sometimes the bloggers say goodbye. Sometimes they just stop as if abducted by aliens. Or by their lives, or jobs, or illness, or death, or families, or by an alter ego. Well, that last bit is just speculation. Often the blogs live on, like deserted homes with the furniture still in them, never growing dusty, never surrounded by weeds or visible decay yet somehow sad. Or not so sad: testaments to an episode in a life in which a voice was raised with humor or outrage or questioning in a solitary room with a keyboard somewhere after the kids were in bed or while the DVR recorded the latest episode of something or other or early in the morning while the plows scraped the streets of the night’s snowfall.

Some nurse bloggers are more bloggers than […]

2016-11-21T13:15:04-05:00November 5th, 2010|healthcare social media, narratives, nursing perspective|6 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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