Aubreigh Parks, the district’s wellness and nursing supervisor, said her team’s health programs, including new telehealth initiatives, are proving successful at both treating students and getting them back to class quickly.
“In Wasatch, we not only do what the Utah standard is, but we go above and beyond that,” she said.
She said statewide, only about 10% of school nurses have their national board certification, but in the Wasatch district, all nurses are certified.
She said the district’s health staff now do telehealth visits and call for prescriptions, which she said help get children back to class sooner. It reduces the amount of time parents spend pulling students out of school and trying to get to the doctor.
“Our staff are qualified to identify symptoms and know when we need to intervene,” she said. “About 80% of our kids who use our telehealth services are back to school learning in less than a day.”
Eliza Brock, who has a second-grader at J.R. Smith Elementary, said the telehealth program saved her from having to make time for a doctor’s appointment when her daughter got an ear infection. Instead, she just had to find five minutes to approve a prescription for her daughter’s care.
“I felt more informed as a parent, and my kid’s been able to stay in school, which is ideal,” she said.
Parks said students are typically in and out of the nurse’s office in about 15 minutes, so kids can start any medicine they need within an hour of their visit.
District health staff have already had 12,000 student visits this year, including about 140 medical emergencies.
“Oftentimes we beat 911,” Parks said. “We’ve become so good at emergency response that we’ve actually avoided having to unnecessarily transport students, and then we follow students who are transported to the hospital so they have a representative from the school district… watching over them until their parents arrive.”
Still, she said the staff’s work happens with a small team. There are four nurses in the district, plus a health aide in each school building. The program has grown faster than anticipated, according to Parks.
“It’s going to be really hard to maintain that with only four nurses,” she said. “We are certainly not going to be able to grow it with only four nurses.”
Parks said each nurse is responsible for about 2,200 students. That’s higher than the Utah average of about 1,500 students per nurse.
