Non-nurses must be
trained to manage
diabetic children

As a nurse as well as the parent of a 10-year-old with type 1 diabetes, I felt compelled to comment on this article (“As illness evolves, so does role of school nurse,” Sept. 9).

I am in complete agreement with Mary Jane Sapko that nurses are the appropriate and most qualified people to be managing children with chronic illnesses at school. I would love nothing more than to see well-needed funding allocated to allow for a full-time school nurse in every public school in America. I believe our children would be healthier and better educated regarding health management.

I did, however, find the last portion of the article a bit disconcerting. Given the fact that there is one nurse assigned to every three to four public schools in the Cicero-Berwyn area, I am concerned with Ms. Sapko’s resistance to having non-nurses trained to manage diabetes in particular. As Ms. Sapko states: Diabetes must be “regularly monitored,” and “can be life-threatening at any given moment.”

If, as the article states, the school nurse visits “every school in District 102 during the course of a week,” how many hours in any given week is she at each school monitoring these children?
If Ms. Sapko happens to be at a different school, who is trained to intervene during a “life-threatening emergency at any given moment” should it occur?

My daughter attends a private school that, like the public school, shares their nurse but allows the staff to be trained to assist my daughter in the absence of the nurse. Before my daughter started kindergarten, I was informed by the Cicero school district that non-nursing personal could not be trained to administer medication under any circumstance.

When I asked what happened if my child needed medication and the nurse was not physically on campus, I was told she could “be there in a reasonable amount of time.” When I requested their definition of “reasonable,” I was told 15 to 20 minutes.

I now have one question for Ms. Sapko and every school nurse who is resisting training ancillary staff to assist in their absence: If it was your child having a seizure due to low blood sugar and needed a lifesaving glucagon injection, would 15 to 20 minutes be reasonable to you?

Laura A Kozak, RN, Berwyn