All About Nursing (16)

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Welcome to All About Nursing with your host Dr. Joyce Bachelor, executive nurse advisor Dr. Bachelor, who will present the significant role nurses play in providing health care in a multitude of health care settings. Listen to some of today's key nurses who work in practice in academia settings and talk about the challenges they face in today's modern medical world.

So please welcome the host of All About Nursing, Dr. Joyce Bachelor. Good evening. I'm your host Dr.

Joyce Bachelor on All About Nursing and we're live on the BBM Global Network and Tune in Radio. We've been talking about different kinds of roles and settings that nurses find themselves in and certainly having an impact in a lot of different ways. And I'm really excited to have my guests on the show this evening, Robin Kogan. And I'll tell you a bit about her in just a second.

But Robin is representing School Nursing, which I think will be really important for you to learn more about in terms of what kinds of things the school nurses do and how much more that she's involved in. So Robin is a nationally certified school nurse currently in her 18th year as a New Jersey school nurse in Camden City School District. She's the education chair for the New Jersey State School Nurses Association. And she's also proud to be at Johnson & Johnson School Health Leadership Fellow and program mentor.

She's been recognized in her home state of New Jersey and nationally for her community-based initiative called the Community Cafe, a conversation that matters. Robert is the honored recipient of multiple awards for her work in the School of Nursing and Population Health. For example, in 2017, the Johnson & Johnson School Nurse of the Year Award, the New Jersey Department of Health 2017 Population Health Year Award. She also serves as faculty in the School Nurse Specialty Program at Rutgers University, Camden School of Nursing, where she teaches the next generation of school nurses.

Robin was presented the 2018 Rutgers University, Camden Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award for her part-time faculty work. It's pretty exciting to also know that Robin writes a weekly blog called the Relentless School Nurse, which you can access on her website, which is RelentlessSchoolNurse.com. So thank you so much for agreeing to be on our show this evening, Robin. Happy to have you.

Thank you, too. Oh, thank you, Joyce. I'm thrilled to be here. And so Robin, let's begin with you telling us a little bit more about the school nurse role that you currently are practicing in.

Yes, I am, as you read in my bio, just started my 18th year as a school nurse in Camden, New Jersey, which is an urban school district that has many layers of complexity. My students, many are who receive free and reduced lunch. My families are also struggling with issues around being undocumented. There's so many complex issues that we find ourselves feeling in a typical school day.

On any given day, families can be detained by immigration services, and children are then picked up by children and family services. These are just some of the really, we call them wicked problems that our families are dealing with in addition to housing insecurity, food insecurity, job insecurity. So I think sometimes people wonder about the expansive role of school nursing. And I'm here to tell you that we really find ourselves involved in so many areas of life inside school and outside of the school day as well.

You know, when I had been my former role here in Austin with the Seton system, the Austin Independence School District was thinking about eliminating the school nurses because financial issues. And, and fortunately, at that time, I boss Charles Barnette was in charge of the system, I didn't work with the AISD to have a subsidy given so that actually the school nurses ended up being employed by Seton. I have to share with you, I was sort of struck with a whole lot of insights that I never really understood in terms of what the school nurses were dealing with. And so what you were describing is something that I think a lot of people do not understand is the complexities of the issues that these children have as well as there's kids with very complex illnesses that are in the schools requiring oversight by the school nurses.

So what led you to become interested in this particular field of nursing? You know, I just want to say you're absolutely right. And I remember clearly, if the issue around what happened in Austin actually made nationwide news, and it did bring to light the impact of not having a school nurse, we're still struggling with that. Less than 50% of schools across this country have a full-time school nurse.

You know, what led me to become a school nurse, it was a very peculiar route. I had been a health service manager for a large railroad system, and I loved my work in occupational health, and our railroad was brought out by another railroad. And so I had a choice. I could either move my entire family to Florida, or I could take a bit of a pause, a break with a severance.

So I chose to take the severance, and that summer my children, who at the time were, I think they were 12, wanted to go to overnight camp. And so I thought, oh, that would be fine. I'll go to overnight camp with them. Little did I know that that one decision, we completely changed the course of my work, my life, my focus.

So we went to overnight camp, and all of my peers, my bunk nape, I called them were school nurses. And so that day, that summer, I decided I think I'll become a school nurse. I had a little bit of a break with a severance, and I enrolled in a school nurse certificate program. And the first day of the first class, I hadn't been in school in years.

The instructor said, if you are willing to work in a, these were her exact words, needy, quote unquote, school district, Camden City is hiring. And I thought, you know what, I had my own roots in that city, and I'm sure we'll get into that story a little bit later. But my dad is from Camden, and I felt that there was definitely in my own personal life with the history that my father had some healing that needed to happen. So I thought that I'm just going to follow this path and see where it leads.

And interestingly enough, today is September 11. And so 17 years ago, I got the call to come for my job interview on September 12. So 18, 17 years ago, tomorrow is when I had my interview. And I remember thinking, you know, at that time, it was such a, we're such a, we're in such crisis and trauma.

And I remember wondering, why am I even doing this? Like, are we even, you know, what is our future going to be here? So anyway, so it's literally the anniversary of when I got the call to become a school nurse with this day of all day. And it sounds like you actually made a really great decision for all the energy and enthusiasm that you still continue to have a 17 plus years later.

So that's, that's wonderful. And here, 18th, that's great. That's true. Yeah.

It's true. It's changed a lot in those 18 years, I'll tell you. But I've been an nurse for 43 years. So more than half of my nursing career has now been in school nursing.

And I, and I'm so thankful that I found this specialty niche part of nursing. And I love what you said. You didn't realize what school nurses really are, you know, the circumstances we find ourselves in. And you really wouldn't know unless you spend a few days in a school nurse's office.

And I have to say, I think many people would turn around and walk out. It's, it's not for the same heart of that for sure. Well, and it's interesting as we were looking at population health and how to address the social determinants of health and how to really make a difference. School nurses are really actually very well positioned to assist in so many different ways, including how do you transition kids back to school with they've been hospitalized.

And I was just struck with the complexities being so much different than I would have ever imagined school nurses were dealing with at home and in the school. So I just find it to be extremely challenging. And so I'm delighted actually personally to have the opportunity and I was in my former role to learn a whole lot more about this particular specialty. This is all about nursing.

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You are listening to all about nursing life in the BBM Global Network and tuning radio. I'm Dr. Joyce Bachel that hosted this show. Before the break, Robin and I were talking about school nursing, which is a specialty that Robin has been working in for over the last 17 years.

I think we're learning a whole lot more about the kinds of roles that school nurses play. Robin, can you tell us what are some of the most pressing issues in school nursing today? Well, I think people may be surprised to learn that school nurses spend up to 35% of our time on mental health issues for our students. Also, certainly, we deal with staff issues as well.

I think that might be a surprising statistic and it's one that is certainly on all of our minds. Given that school just restarted again, we're all returning to school the last several weeks. Some people went a little bit earlier in August. We also spend a good deal of our time and efforts on children with complex medical needs and medically fragile children who, typically in past years, have been getting school-based services in a different setting.

Because of financial issues, these children have been brought back into the school setting. So, we have children, for example, who are on capitalized several times a day, who have tube feedings multiple times a day. Certainly, our children are diabetic children, children with chronic asthma, who have uncontrolled chronic health conditions that school nurses spend a good deal of time working with them, teaching them, helping the families manage these chronic health conditions. And in addition to, some nurses have a tremendous caseload of students.

I mean, I'll do you an example in Oregon, a school nurse can be responsible for up to 4,000 students. So, when we talk about safe staffing ratios and what is a safe staffing ratio for a nurse to patient ratio, and then I tell people that for the longest time there was a number of loading out there, that was at one full nurse to 750 children, that's pretty astounding. And that is, it is not something that every school district follows. It really shouldn't be.

It really should be based on safe staffing and workload, not an arbitrary number. So, I think the sheer scope and volume of what we managed in a given day is pretty astounding. You know, and I think that you're raising something that, again, I think a lot of people do not understand and myself concluded until I started working with the school nurses with the Austin-Binta school district, is that when nurses are not in the schools, sometimes it's the the principal's assistant or it can be just about anybody that you can find that will administer the medications that children need while they're in school. And I kept thinking myself, wow, that is a lot of assumptions that we're making there that people know what those medications are.

Yeah, very unfair practice. And I happen to be in a jersey where the laws are a little bit different. There is laws through the Department of Education that now they change the wording. It used to be a school nurse in every building and they changed the language to every campus, a certified school nurse.

So, when you jersey, we are certified through the Department of Education, which is one of, which is my program at Rutgers University School of Nursing and Camden is a school nurse certificate program. And there's 10 programs like mine in the state of New Jersey, but not every state has that certification. There really isn't a set standard we'd like there to be across the country, but every state is completely different. Even within a state, there's different.

So, the state of Florida, for example, when the park land shooting happened, I believe that there is not necessarily, there's definitely not a certified school nurse, but I don't believe there's a nurse in every building. I think oftentimes they use agency nurses, but not necessarily school nurses. And it is a very different specialty. It's really a niche practice within nursing.

And so, I'll just talk about Florida again, and it goes by county. So, some counties, there is no nurse in, not only is there not a nurse in every building, there may not be a nurse at all. And some counties are nurses that probably share multiple buildings, or there's unlicensed assistance. And so, there's a whole issue of delegating, and it's such a complex issue, and really, what is best practice is to have a certified school nurse in every building.

There's too much at stake. So, how did you get yourself to the certified state? Like what kind of a preparation did you, you know, did you have in order to be in a place where you can take on the challenges that you're now seeing? You know, in New Jersey, there is no set number of years of practice before you can become a certified school nurse.

You have to go through, you become certified by going through a university-based program. And so, you take a certain credit load. The courses that we teach, but we're not because we're also certified to teach health education, K to 12. So, there's there's a health education course, there's a curriculum course, there's, you know, there's, it doesn't really apply to every state, but when you are in a state that does have certification, there's specific courses that are required.

Special needs, special education, cultural competency, there's a whole variety of courses that a nurse would take to become certified as a school nurse. And there's a practicum piece. There's a hands-on practicum piece where you are working hand-in-hand with a certified school nurse in our program. Our students are with certified school nurses for 90 clinical hours.

They teach 45 additional hours. And in our program in Camden, we have a population health component. We just changed our program to be at a master's level. And so, our students also do 45 community health hours.

So, they really are leaving our program understanding part of, you know, the widest scope of what a school nurse does within the health office and outside of the health office. I think this is really interesting that I think it's great that your state has a certified program. I don't, I mean, as I listen to you, I'm thinking about the states that don't require that and just having a lot of questions popping up in my head. So, right now, we are coming to you live from the BDM Global Network and TuneIn Radio for all about nursing.

And I'm Dr. Joyce Bachelor and we'll continue this conversation when we come back. Dr. Rob Moyer is the director of the Ocean River Institute and he is passionate about saving the ocean by helping dolphins suffer from nitrogen pollution.

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Before the break we were talking about how nurses get prepared for to become in the specialty of school health nursing and learning about the certification that is done by the university that Robyn teaches at. And I was just curious because it's so complex because you're taking care of children anywhere from kindergarten to 12th grade. That's very different needs for very different groups of students. So if someone is thinking about becoming a school nurse, what would you share with them?

What would the best things be to do? I love that question because I do always encourage our students. Our whole team does encourage our students who are interested in thinking about becoming a school nurse to sub. Go into a school district, get your substitute certificate, and sub for a school nurse and see what you really think.

I think one of the most difficult transitions for nurses who are coming from the acute care setting is that school nursing is an independent practice. You are not surrounded by a team. You are alone. And so while someone, there's no one to say, hey, can you take a second look at this?

What do you think about this? Very rarely do school nurses work together. Maybe some high schools might have more than one school nurse, but as you saw in my description of some school nurses, let's say in Oregon, California, and many other states where there could be one school nurse or 4,000 students, you're not working with colleagues. And that's why a membership in our national organization is so important.

It is a lifeline for school nurses. We talk to each other through our online community list serve, school nurses who each state has a state school nurse association, and then many counties have their own county association. So there's a great network of support that is not necessarily face to face support, which is why social media and school nursing is such a big passion of mine. Finding your tribe in social media, school nurses who tweet is a group that I love to talk to.

We actually have online school nurse tweet chats, and just so that we can connect when we're not at conference together or seeing each other face to face. So really getting your feet in the door, being a sub, really seeing what you think, go over night camp and be a camp nurse. If you can get your over night camp, you'll be a great school nurse. It felt like a part-time job.

I did it for 10 years, and it was the best training ever to become a school nurse. So I'm just curious when you're finding yourself in these independent settings and things come up that perhaps you have not seen before, or you do have questions or concerns. Do you have other accesses in the communities at the school, sometimes set up with local emergency departments or other physician practices or some kind of resource? So, you know, when we send them out, it's our favorite.

We have very limited resources and limited supplies and tools. I mean, I have my assessment skills, I have my steps of scope, I have my oxygen, I have my Epi-pan, I have my glucagon, I have the emergency equipment that I need, but it can be very intimidating. Really, anything that can happen out in the world will happen in a school. And we are responsible for the students, the staff, and the visitors.

And so, you have to be very prepared, you really have to trust your assessment skills, you have to know, it's a really a judgment call based on your experience, your training, and you really need to stay on top of your practice. You have to know your nurse practice act, be involved in local and national organizations and go for as much training as possible, because you never know what you're going to see day to day. It's a very high alert kind of job, like a math unit sometimes, honestly. Well, that's what I was sensing is you're describing that.

And I was thinking about school nurses that are in rural communities, because we're all hospitals already have challenges. And yeah. Yeah, telehealth is another interesting thing that's come along. There's telehealth in rural communities that are being piloted.

There's some schools have school-based health centers where there's the nurse practitioner or physician, but they're not there all day every day. And it's a very different role than a typical school nurse where they're more episodic and acute care. And we're dealing with typically a well population, but of course, you know, we also have children with fragile, who are medically fragile and have chronic health conditions. I know in my city, one in three children who live in the city have asthma.

So imagine those challenges. So, and not to mention, you know, community violence, all the other social determinants of health that we find ourselves dealing with that come into a school and impact the school community. So, it is complex and it really is, you know, we have to stay on top of our practice and be mindful of what we need to learn lifelong learners are the best school nurses, I think. It's just true for nursing period.

Things change so rapidly in our field. Oh, absolutely. And I remember early on in my practice, I would say things like, Oh, now I've seen everything. And I learned very quickly that I had to stop saying that.

Exactly. You say that everything happens. Yeah, definitely. So what kind of changes would you like to see in school nursing?

I I'm on a path to change the way we communicate with our health care providers. And there is such a disconnect. You know, we are in 2018. We should be part school nurses are on the health care team.

We should be speaking to each other electronically. We should not, you know, right now, oftentimes we are relying on parents to bring messages back and forth when we should be dealing directly with the providers. And so in my city, we started a school nurse pediatrician round table to try to improve our relationship. I think this is really about relationship building.

And once you build those relationships, I think some of the barriers that are put up for example, around HIPAA and FERPA will come down because people will understand more of the role of the school nurse. We are, you know, I find out sometimes that my students have been in the hospital because they're wearing a bracelet. That is just not right. I should know that my student was admitted and what the discharge plans are.

And it just astounds me all the time that we are still not connected electronically. It's really a problem that must be addressed. It is so unsafe. Yeah, I think your idea about looking at telehealth, that's one thing, but there's certainly a lot more that we could really be doing.

So for now, though, we're coming to you live from the Vingleville Network and Tune in Radio. This is all about nursing and I'm Dr. Joyce Batchel, host of the show. We'll be right back.

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I'm Dr. Joyce Batchel, host of the show and I'm delighted to be back with my guest Robin, Gogan, who is a school nurse. At the beginning of the show, you were talking about something with your dad and that it played a role in having you decide to become a school nurse. Can you share a little bit more about what that impact was and why?

Sure. Actually, what about why I chose to come to Camden to be a school nurse? This also ties into what's happening today with school shootings and school violence. My dad, very tragically, when he was 12 years old, he lived in Camden.

My grandfather was a pharmacist and my dad and his mom and his grandma lived behind and over the pharmacy. One day, actually, it was just 69 years ago, a few days ago, a neighbor went on a mass shooting spree and he killed 13 people in my dad's neighborhood, including my grandmother and my grandfather and my great-grandmother. At 12, my father was left in Orphan. Anyway, he imagined the horror of all of that happened in the city where I happened to work.

My dad survived that day because his mom hit him in the closet. Fast forward to February 14, 2017 in Parkland, Florida, and my niece is student of Parkland High School, a major film in Douglas High School in Parkland. That afternoon, my sister called me and she's a sister and art teacher in that district. We're both a lot of children, she's an art teacher, we never talked to her in a day because we're both with kids.

I answered the phone and I said, Mary is everything okay? I'm still in school and she said no. There's an active shooter in Carley's school and she's hiding in a closet. So I just, you know, everything for me changed that moment because I just could not believe that 69 years later, this was happening to my family again.

Thankfully, for my niece, she did survive, thank God, she was not in the building where the shooting occurred. She was hiding in a closet with 17 of her peers. She is a journalism major now in college, thankfully, and her teacher had to wear with all to hide them in the closet, just like my father hid in the closet. We knew that Carley had survived.

We didn't know the circumstances of anything that happened as the afternoon unfolded, but she was texting my sister so we knew she was okay. They hid there for about two hours until they were released by the flat team. But my sister was standing next to a mom whose daughter was not answering the text and not answering the phone. And my sister kept saying, what should I say to her?

What am I supposed to say to her? In my heart, I knew that it was not good because I was watching television as I was talking to her on the phone. She was standing outside with the yellow tape trying to find my niece and I could see that they were sharing their white devastation at the school and there were going to be multiple fatalities. In my family, this is personal, but it is also professional because I am a school nurse in a school district where there is tremendous community violence.

This activism button turned on both seem for me after that. I have spent the last, it feels like forever, but it has only been what, six or seven months, really looking at school nurses using our voice for school safety for to talk about what we do, to talk about the importance of having a school nurse in every school. Here I was, I know, I know, stop the bleed and I know CPR and I can use an AED and I could not help my niece and I could not help any of those kids. And it just has to stop.

I mean, I just read a statistic that was so astounding to me. 26,000 children have died since 1999. I'm not paying in school shootings alone, but in shooting. 26,000 empty deaths.

I mean, what are we doing? We're not doing enough. And so that is my, that is the focus of my activism more. Even the summer I tended a nursing activism think tank.

I think it's the first of its kind. It was a phenomenal experience led by Dr. Peggy Chin. And, you know, there are nurses who are really feeling very passionate about many different issues and we need to use our voice in a way that that the media pays attention to us.

And so anyway, I could just talk for hours about this issue, but I didn't want to raise it. We haven't, you know, we have a moral ethical social obligation to address violence as a public health crisis that it is. And, you know, earlier you had said that mental health is about 30% of what you end up dealing with. And I would be curious, are you seeing that number go up as we've had more and more violence in the different communities and shootings at schools?

I want to say, I want to really be cautious about losing mental illness and and shoot. You know, I think that there's a, you know, it's really not been proven that I don't want to continue the stigma of mentally ill people are dangerous. Oh, no, no, violent. Yeah.

I don't know you weren't. But I think that people can misinterpret that. I think violence is a contagion. Violence is the issue.

Our society does not in help deal with violence. There is an organization called Cure Violence, which was started by a physician who worked for the World Health Organization. I don't want to get his name wrong. So I believe it's Gary Sledgen.

And he, I think his idea is so brilliant. He actually, he worked in Africa and worked on these on viruses. And when he came back to the United States and saw this outbreak of tremendous violence, gang violence, community violence, school violence, he had the same thought that if this is a, this belongs in the health sector, violence with a contagion. And so one of the things that he's had tremendous success in working with gangs, because what they do is they bring in, this is the actual term of this, this position, instead of like community health workers, they have violence I totally see that being used in a school.

You know, we have, we have issues every day where kids come to school, upset about something or something happens in the community. And then it's brought back into the school building. You know, that's where we should be spending our energy. Not giving people a gun.

Sorry, Robin. I'm going to need to cut in that it's almost time to take a break. So this is all about nursing. And I'm your host, Dr.

Joyce Bachelor. We're live on the Bee Bim Global Network and Tune in Radio. We'll be right back. Renaissance woman, Trailblazer, Maverick.

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Joyce Bachelor, the host of the show. Before the break, Robin and I were talking about her experience, what's a very powerful story involving her family. It's very difficult to believe that that happened, but obviously it has happened. And then sharing some of the discussion around what's the impact on the students that are involved and going to school and are involved in these different school shootings.

And I was asking Robin if she thought that perhaps when she was saying that 30% of the time they're dealing with students in mental health issues, if they're also seeing students that are feeling more traumatized, more stressed, more anxious, because obviously going to school isn't a place that historically has been one where you have to worry about whether or not someone's going to come in and start to shoot you. So I was just curious, if you could share more about what kind of impacts are you seeing in terms of the students when they're involved in this kind of traumatic events? Well, I think the fact that these are happening all over the country, leave everybody feeling vulnerable and traumatized. And schools should be a place of safety.

But so now we find ourselves having active shooter drills along with fire drills. And it is really unnerving. There's definitely an uptick in anxiety. There's many more stressors.

I think people are very much on edge. And in a place like hand and where I work, interestingly, not so far to date, the math school shootings have been much more suburban based than not urban. But on the other hand, my students spend a lot of time, unfortunately, hearing them violence at night, to drive by shootings at that time. So the whole issue of gun violence in communities, it doesn't matter if it's urban or suburban, violence is really a public health, if I had an epidemic proportion at this point.

And active shooter drills are very traumatizing to schools. I mean, we're doing them in preschool. This is happening across the country. Yeah, we're having active shooter drills in preschool.

Kids are, there's even a nursery rhyme song about, you know, shutting closing the lights and shutting the door and lying on the floor and coming out the play when it's safe again. I mean, it is just unbelievable that this is what what we're doing. And I feel like we're re-traumatizing our kids. I actually just wrote a recent blog post I wrote with called Full Disclosure on Fearful to Welcome in Other September.

And it made me so sad to write it. But I do feel that way. I feel like we are at a crossroads. And if we don't do enough to address the epidemic of violence, it's going to continue.

I mean, 26,000 empty chairs, empty desks should shock everybody. That is a staggering figure. Yes, that is definitely a staggering statistic. And that was that was 1999 to 2016, that wasn't even up to this present day.

I think the number, I don't want to just throw a number out there, but I know that is a definite number that has, you know, data behind it. It's just a staggering number of children are killed by gun violence every year. I think there's a tremendous number of family and I'm not against guns. I'm against people who are unfetting guns, I'm against guns that are not stored safely.

There's a there's a staggering number. I think it's 40% of households with children under 18 do not lock up their weapons. Wow. Things that we can do to keep our kids safe.

Why aren't we doing it? You know, it's interesting that you are sharing all this. And I think sometimes we're also not paying as much attention to the fact that the teachers, the principals, the school nurses, the caregivers of working in the hospitals even are also becoming very traumatized. And I know the shooting that occurred in Las Vegas was extremely traumatic.

And, you know, there's anticipation that there's a lot of turnover that will happen because nurses and doctors and others can't come to work without seeing people pulling being pulled up to their organization with holes in them from the shibilit shootings. And so, you know, I think that we're probably not understanding the amount of depression and all that's happening with people that are trying to care for others and do the kind of work that we've been trying to do. So do you hear some of that in the school nurses that you interface with? Is there much different dialogue going on without those groups as well?

Oh, absolutely, Terrell. There really is a great concern about school safety. There's a great divide between how we're going to manage it. What we do know is that we are facing, I mean, we're experiencing all of us are experiencing, but adverse childhood experiences, some of that we are putting on our own students by re-traumatizing them with these active shoot-a-dills.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be prepared. We should always be prepared. But we also have to be aware of the messages that we're sending. You know, we need to create faithful environments.

And I just don't think that I don't think it's being addressed. I don't think there's enough research about it. I think that there, you know, there's a void in the impact, the research. I mean, I just, it's astounding to me that we've reached this place.

And it's because, you know, they keep kicking the issue down the road, but we have more and more and more school shootings. Columbine was not the first. It was probably one of the more dramatic ones. But look at my father.

That was 1949. If you look at the profile of the killer there, honestly, it wasn't that different. It was someone, you know, who was a loner. There were, he gave lots of clues about what he was going to do.

I think I just read recently, it was more than, I think it was seven and ten of the mass shooters in recent years told people what they were going to do. The pipeline shooter said, I am going to be a school shooter. And so there's just such an array. We need to look at this from such a global perspective in an urgent way, you know.

And it's very frustrating as a school nurse trying to fight this battle. I know that I'm not alone in this. I guess I see it from a different perspective because of the generational trauma from my family. And I'll be the first one to say this is really chirpy.

You know, I feel very, very unsafe. I feel very traumatized from my father, but certainly after my niece. I mean, you know, to put for this to happen in one family is just unthinkable. So I do worry when I go to school every day.

Thanks for sharing that with us. This is all about nursing. I'm your host, Dr. Joyce Bachelor.

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Prior to our last break, Robin was telling us more about her activism that she's been leading around violence in schools. There's been so many wonderful things to share today in terms of awareness issues that we really need to be paying more attention to. Robin, what would you like the listeners to take away from the conversation you and I have been having today? I would love nurses to take away or listeners to take away that we can all use our voice for the greater good, to bring awareness to these issues that are so pressing.

They are not easy to talk about. I'm the first to acknowledge that. When we don't talk about them, when we push them away, they just discontinue the issue gets bigger and bigger. I feel like nurses, there are so many of us, we're so strong in number, but we need to use our voices to really fight for these issues that we've been pretty quiet about, I think.

I went to that nursing activism thing, and it was very inspiring to be with like-minded people who are willing to stand up for something that may be controversial, but I know that as a shared value, I think I said this before, children safety, people safety, people feeling safe in their homes, communities, churches, parking lots, and movie theaters, we need to feel safe again in our country. I think that the positive is that we can use our voice in this way, that I have found ways to find a way to use nursing as activism, as a form of activism, and as a form of leadership. Writing to me has been a great outlet. I really encourage nurses start a blog, write letters to the editor, write op-ed, talk about what you're passionate about, and put our voice about their as nurses.

I think we need to be heard, and it's more the greater community well-being. It's interesting as you're speaking, I'm also thinking to myself that our lay population that may be listening, what words of wisdom do you have for them as well in terms of their potential to also play a role along with the nurses who may be listening, correct? I think that's one of the calls that I think you have here is an action for all of us to be thinking about what do we need to do in order to have all these different environments safer. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, vote. We need to use our vote. We need to use the power of what we have, which is our ability to stand up for what's right for, if we have questions and concerns about safety in our community, talk to your local representatives. When we remain silent, we're being complicit, complicit, and we need to say what we're concerned about.

Community safety is a huge issue, and we all can play a part in that. And so, yeah, that's a little apparent. Work with your school nurses, work with your school leadership, tell them what your concerns are, be part of the solution. We can all dispel the problem.

It's really implementing solutions that is most important at this point. I think sometimes we have problem fatigue. We know all of it. We know.

We think we know most of the issues, but by the time it gets to solutions, I think we're just all exhausted. So, I'd love to feel that we're regrouping and looking at solutions like let's eat dessert first, you know, let's get to the solutions and implement them and see where we go next because our kids, our schools, our communities need it desperately. I think that you've raised so many wonderful points on the show. I really want to thank you, Robin, for not only being on the show, but sharing your personal story with what occurred with your family.

I know that sometimes it's not easy to do, and I hope your niece continues to do really well as she's moved into her college years. And I think that hopefully people will, in fact, be more energized to really become more involved. You're listening to all about Nursing Live and the BBM Global Network in Tune & Radio on Dr. Joyce Bachelor, the host of the show, Tune in next week.

Thank you. You've been listening to All About Nursing with your host, Dr. Joyce Bachelor. Tune in each week and get a daily dose of nursing and the healthcare services they provide and how nurses are finding innovative ways to address the key healthcare issues they're facing today.

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