Skip to content
School Health

Protecting Your School Nurses (& Your District) from Liability Claims 

Share article

The world around us is growing more complicated every day. For your school health program, that means becoming even more diligent in protecting your district and ensuring that you uphold the standard of care. Every school and district has its own challenges—one school may have a higher percentage of students with chronic conditions requiring medication. Others might have a larger population of students requiring reminders for vaccines.  

While there are many day-to-day processes that go unnoticed, the stakes are high. In this blog post, we’ll discuss ways to ensure no student slips through the cracks, nurses are protected, and your district stays out of the news.

Understanding Liability Risks in School Health Services 

While in school, students depend on an extensive network of people to care for them and keep them safe. School nurses are a core part of this network of care, and often go above and beyond. In the world of liability, unfortunately that isn’t enough. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure you’re doing everything you can to protect yourself.  

Common Liability Scenarios 

Because of the potential consequences of taking the wrong medication or missing a dose of prescribed medication, medication mismanagement poses a risk. About 19% of children in the United States have a condition that requires medication, a percentage that has increased over time. With that increase has come an increased need for medication administration in schools, but staffing health professionals has not kept pace.  

With limited nursing staff, training—and the documentation of that training—becomes a more important element to providing adequate care. Training in event of medical emergencies is another important scenario. Simply having equipment available in case of emergency isn’t sufficient: school staff must be trained appropriately on the appropriate response to medical emergencies. 

Documentation is ripe for liability issues, too. Documentation itself is not always the culprit, though. If you tend to wait until you have long blocks of time to document student visits, that is considered less reliable than contemporaneous charting. Even if your memory is accurate, it is significantly more trustworthy to point to real-time documentation at the time of a visit to know exactly what happened, symptoms, treatment, etc.  

A Word About Insurance 

You might be reading this and thinking, “my district has me covered.” It is entirely possible that your school district has you covered for malpractice insurance. If that’s the case, it’s always a good idea to know exactly what is covered and how you’re covered. Will they cover the cost of legal representation in case of a claim? If not, you may want to supplement your coverage.  

Strategies to Protect School Nurses and the District 

Now that we’ve discussed some of the reasons for why liability is important, let’s dive into a few strategies to protect yourself.  

Clear Policies and Procedures 

Different states have different laws regarding health services protocols, so you’ll want to ensure each of your district policies complies with the law. You may want to have version for health services staff, and a separate version for other staff so that everyone knows how to respond to any situation, whether it’s medication administration or an emergency response.  

Training for Staff 

Simply having policies available to everyone in the school community isn’t enough. It’s critical to ensure that everyone knows how to access those resources and is trained sufficiently so that they can respond appropriately for any scenario. Training is especially important when you have students who have conditions like epilepsy, severe allergies, diabetes, or others that can be life-threatening without immediate attention. 

This kind of training should be conducted and communicated regularly to ensure the information stays fresh for everyone.  

Documentation Standards 

Documentation is so important in case of any legal action taken against you. Documentation should be thorough, accurate, and timely. Of course, nurses know how important documentation is in treating students. The challenge is often staffing; when one school nurse is responsible for multiple campuses and hundreds of students in a single day, it is crucial that they have access to easy, accurate, and user-friendly ways to document.  

An electronic health records system can provide ways to speed up documentation without sacrificing accuracy. With templates, for instance, nurses can ensure that a student with diabetes has the consistent documentation every time they see the school nurse, even if there is a substitute nurse for a day.  

Practical Action Plan for K-12 Leaders 

If you’re wondering where to go from here, we’ve got you covered with a simple action plan. 

  1. Conduct a risk assessment of your current processes/practices 
  2. Create or update your liability prevention plans 
  3. Review or create your plan to communicate and train staff 
  4. Ensure your health services team is on board with any updates to existing policies 

School nurses are endlessly empathetic, and truly are heroes for the work they do each day. As anyone who works in a school district knows, caring for students sometimes isn’t enough to protect yourself from legal action. That’s why it’s critical to embed practices that prioritize the standard of care for students, along with all of the legally sound documentation that goes with that care.

Frontline’s electronic health records software can help you with documentation, reporting, and so much more.
Learn More

Elise Ozarowski

Elise is a writer and member of the award-winning content team at Frontline Education. A former member of Frontline’s events team, she is passionate about making connections, whether that be in person at events, online via social media or directly in her writing.