The School Nursing Service does not provide urgent medical care. If you require urgent medical advice please contact 111, 999 or your GP (depending on the time of day and the severity of your symptoms).

If there is risk of significant harm (safeguarding) you should make a request for support via Devon Children’s Services and if this is an immediate risk also contact the police.

How to request support from a school nurse

There are several ways to request support. You can:

• complete our request for school nurse support form
• phone or email through our PHN hubs
• use the ChatHealth texting Service – 0752 063 1722. This is a confidential and anonymous service for 11 to 19-year-olds.

Who can make a request for support

People that can request support include:

• young people aged 11 to 19
• parents or carers
• other professionals working with a child, young person, or family where they have their consent to request support on their behalf

How a school nurse can help

School nurses can provide support about a range of health and wellbeing issues. We provide a list of categories to choose from but there is an option to select ‘other’ if you feel the options don’t best describe the need that you want support with. These include:

• going to the toilet or having toileting accidents (bladder and bowel)
• healthy eating, exercise or growth or both (including weight)
• medical condition or worry about health
• feelings and emotions
• feeling safe or unsafe around family or friends at home or in the community
• special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
• sexual health and relationships (including gender and identity)
• sleep
• smoking, alcohol or drugs (or both)
• moving school, changes at school, or not attending school

If you’re not sure if a school nurse can help take a look at Health for Kids or Health for Teens to find out more about what we do, or give us a call or text.

Choosing how you want to receive support

You can tell us how you would prefer us to contact you and/or where you would prefer any support to be provided. While we aim to use your preferred method there may be some occasions where this might not be possible.

We currently have two options for how we provide support, and we invite you to consider which would work best for you.

Option 1

We are currently piloting a new response to requests for support known as a Single Session Approach. This focuses specifically on one area of need you are seeking help with, providing you with information and guidance to help you decide your next steps. This can usually be provided within a single appointment, but single session approaches can be accessed on more than one occasion.

Option 2

The school nurse will invite you to explore what’s going well and where you may need some additional support. They may use a Family Health Needs Assessment which helps us understand your wider world.

Both of our options are led by you and both can lead to accessing our wider menu of support. We welcome you choosing the option you think will work for you best at this time.

What information is needed

Not all the information we ask for has to be filled out in order to make a request for support. Any information that is essential is highlighted with a red asterisk. This is because we need certain information to be able to respond to the request. However, the more information that you can give us the easier it will be for us to understand how we might best be able to support.

For 11 to 19-year-olds, essential information includes:

• your name, date of birth, gender (but you can choose not to say if you prefer), address, and phone number (if you do not have a phone number you can still request support but must provide us with at least one way of making contact with you)
• the school you attend and the area you live in – this is to make sure that your request goes to the right team
• the type of need you want support with (you can choose more than one)

For parents or carers and professionals, essential information includes:

• the child or young person’s name, date of birth, gender, address, and contact details
• your details
• the type of need that you are requesting support with (you can choose more than one)

Please note, where a child or young person is not in education, or attends an independent school setting, we provide services based on where the child or young person lives.

If you are submitting a request on behalf of someone else, please ensure you have sought their consent and that they give permission for you to do this.

How long it will take to complete

This depends on how much information you provide in the request. If you are filling out a request for yourself or your family, it should take less time to complete as the information is about you and what support you feel you need.

It may take someone else doing this a little bit longer as they will need to gather this information from you first so that they have all the information they need and understand your needs and the support you would like well enough, to complete the form.

However, in most cases we expect it should take no longer than 12 minutes to complete which is based on answering all the questions and not just the essential questions.

What happens next

Once you have completed the form you can choose to receive a confirmation email by entering your email address at the end of the form

The request will be received by email into one of our PHN hubs where a member of the School Nursing Team will look at this to see how we feel we could help. We aim to review all requests within a week of receiving them and respond within two weeks (this may take longer to reach you if reply is by letter).

A member of the team will then be in contact with you by phone, email, or letter.

We may offer a phone appointment, a face-to-face appointment, or we may make suggestions about other services that could better support you or provide some additional help alongside school nursing support.

If something changes

Please contact us to let us know of any changes whether this is a change in contact details, if the level of support required has changed (especially if this has increased in severity), or if support is no longer needed or wanted.

Please use the contacts below to do this linked to where you attend school or live. Don’t worry if you’re not sure as we will make sure your message gets to the right team.