Expanding disaster preparedness training for school nurses to a comprehensive school preparedness program

Building upon the success of training 17% of Pennsylvania's (PA) school nurse population in a National Association of School Nurses (NASN) curriculum, the University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health, Center for Public Health Preparedness (UPCPHP) expanded its offerings and resources in 2006-2007. The expansion created a broader school preparedness training program based on evaluation results and lessons learned during the previous year. The first part of this development involved creating a unique agreement between the UPCPHP and NASN to train trainers in “Disaster Preparedness for School Nurses.” Since Fall 2005, 350 PA school nurses have been trained in NASN's curriculum. To address the demand for training up to 150 more school nurses by Fall 2007, seven PA school nurses were trained as trainers and now teach the “Disaster Preparedness for School Nurses” curriculum nationally, and preferentially in PA. Second, in response to evaluation results from the trainings, UPCPHP began offering training to school administrators through conferences. Third, to assist schools to comply with a recent federal policy that they become National Incident Management System (NIMS) compliant, UPCPHP partnered with local Emergency Management Agencies (EMA) to provide Incident Command System/NIMS trainings to school personnel. UPCPHP arranges for a trainer from the local EMA to conduct the training. This also addresses another request on the evaluations from the school nurses: to include the EMA in school preparedness trainings. Finally, UPCPHP has created a webpage devoted to school preparedness, which provides future training dates and reviewed resources, both UPCPHP's and others.