Introduce Yourself
While networking at my first school nurse conference back in 1992, a school nurse leader gave me some advice. If you really want to do what’s best for children, you need to assess their needs, then go find out who can help them and introduce yourself.
Introducing yourself to key stakeholders, whether they are legislators, school board members, local/state department of health leaders, universities, can be the start of a conversation that can help you achieve improved student health outcomes. These improved outcomes may be for an individual student or lead to systems changes for your school community and beyond.
This advice has helped many of us in Missouri over the years. Here is one example... While setting up for a Missouri Coordinated School Health Coalition (MCSHC) conference during 2017, I noticed that the Missouri Association of Community Task Forces (ACT Missouri) conference was just ending. I went over to their registration table and introduced myself as a school nurse. How fortuitous! ACT Missouri’s mission is to promote safe, healthy, and drug-free communities, which aligns with the MCSHC and the Missouri Association of School Nurses (MASN). ACT Missouri was interested in collaborating, so we set up a more formal meeting with ACT MO, MASN, and MCSHC. The result was a cross-over lunch at our November 2018 Conferences. The panel discussion was educational for all. School nurses learned more about their region specific prevention partner resources and we all learned that all three of the organizations present had supported several pieces of health legislation in the past. We now look forward to more collaboration in the future.
My advice... Send a Happy New Year card to your Senator's and House Representative's and introduce yourself!
Resources:
ACT Missouri https://actmissouri.org/
Missouri Association of School Nurses https://missourischoolnurses.org/
Missouri Coordinated School Health Coalition https://www.healthykidsmo.org/
NASN’s Framework for 21st Century School Nursing Practice https://www.nasn.org/nasn/nasn-resources/professional-topics/framework
Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/wscc/model.htm