School Nurses in Alicante: Sporadic Reinforcement Without Exclusive Dedication

School nurses have been a primary demand of the nursing community in the Comunitat over recent years. The Conselleria de Sanidad addressed this demand last year, although the implementation has not satisfied the professionals in the sector.

The Comunitat has 437 school nurses, but this title requires clarification, as these professionals do not work exclusively in educational centres, but rather provide sporadic support from health centres to which they are assigned.

The Alicante Nursing College, echoing the stance of the General Nursing Council (CGE), supports a model where nurses dedicate their entire working day to educational centres, focusing on health promotion, disease prevention, and the acquisition of healthy habits.

They assert that the scope of action for school nurses is vast: from systematically addressing health education and the acquisition of healthy lifestyle habits, caring for and monitoring children with chronic conditions who would struggle to attend school without a nurse, minimizing school absenteeism and parental work absenteeism, attending to acute episodes, to being health references and agents not only for students but also for teachers and families.

The ratio of school nurses in Spain is far from the European average. According to data from the CGE, our country has one school nurse for every 6,368 students, which is significantly below the European Union average of one school nurse per 750 students. The Spanish figures remain insufficient, and as Florentino Pérez Raya, president of the CGE, states: "It is necessary to urgently address the implementation of this figure across the entire national territory."