nursing to adopt a leadership role that responds effectively to the needs of the school age population.
Leadership of school health journey - Nurse as Navigator
Although the school nurse may not occupy a readily identifiable role in the public consciousness or have access to a robust evidence base, contact with the school nursing service results in the school nurse role being valued by service users (Lightfoot and Bines, 2000). Parents and teachers who have had contact with the school nursing service valued the ability of the school nurse to negotiate the system and work across agencies, while children particularly valued having a person outside their immediate school and home from whom to seek advice (Lightfoot and Bines, 2000). An overarching role as a health advisor to educators, parents and young people was particularly valued. It is this sense of a role that embraces the coordination and leadership of health advice to ensure the health and well-being of the school-aged population that could point to a means to focus and define school nursing. In the absence of sufficient evidence to clearly focus school nursing interventions the remainder of this paper concentrates on exploring a conceptual framework that could clarify the school nursing role. Drawing on concepts developed within cancer care and applied to cancer nursing, a remit for the school nurse as navigator of the child’s school health journey is proposed.
The navigator role for nursing is a concept that emerged in cancer care as a means of meeting the ‘informational, decisional and educational needs of women with breast cancer’ (Till, 2003) and has recently been expanded to encompass generic cancer