Our nurse practitioner-led School Health Clinics deliver primary care to medically-underserved students in Philadelphia schools to ensure that they are healthy, in school, and ready to learn.

Problem

Medically underserved students throughout Philadelphia and across the country face various obstacles to school success, including poor health and lack of access to quality, timely, and affordable medical care. In addition to greater likelihood of underperformance in school, underserved and unhealthy students are also at high risk of truancy and dropout.

Solution

Our nurse practitioner-led School Health Clinics (SHCs) bring quality primary care to medically underserved students where they belong, in school, to ensure that they are healthy and ready to learn. The SHCs target medically-underserved students in grades Pre-K through 8 at two sites in Philadelphia: Pan American Academy Charter School in Eastern North Philadelphia and Belmont Charter School in West Philadelphia. The SHCs are operated by nurse practitioners from Temple University, who offer primary care services, preventive services, social services, dental services, vision services and health outreach and education to all students at the Pan American and Belmont schools. In addition, they help students manage chronic disease conditions such as asthma and diabetes and are able to prescribe medications and coordinate care with the children’s own pediatricians. As a result children have greater chances of staying healthy and being ready to learn in school.

Example

The school based health center is a partnership between Education Plus Health, the National Nursing Centers Consortium, Pan American Academy Charter School, Belmont Charter School and the Temple University College of Health Professions and Social Work. The health centers are staffed by an interdisciplinary team of nurse practitioners who are nursing professors and nursing students from Temple University serving their curriculum-required community-based clinical rotations. The team offers preventive health services, primary care services, dental services, vision services, behavioral health services, and health and wellness education. Preventive health services offered to children include screenings for common chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes, immunizations, and home assessments to determine environmental and health risks. The health centers reduce overall medical costs by decreasing the overuse of the emergency room (ER) by students who lack a reliable medical home. To date, the health center model has proven to decrease truancy rates in students, as parents are able to send their children to school because of the ability of the nurse practitioner to manage the children’s illness. This chronic disease management has helped to reduce the number of student absences due to illness and missed classroom time for medical appointments. Attendance rates increased from 94% to 96% at Pan American Academy after the first year of the health center’s implementation. The two health centers combined serve over 1,100 students (450 at Pan American and 650 at Belmont).

Marketplace

The alternative to our nurse practitioner model is the traditional school nurse. The traditional school nurse model cannot provide primary care, immunizations, physicals, or prescriptions like the master’s or doctoral prepared primary care nurse practitioner. Furthermore, the traditional school nurse is typically not in the school fulltime whereas the Temple Department of Nursing model places nurse practitioners and nursing students in the school clinic during all school hours, 5 days a week. Finally, the traditional school nurse focuses more on managing illnesses while our model places a higher priority on preventing illnesses and keeping children in school and healthy, emphasizing health promotion, disease prevention, chronic and acute disease management and wellness education.