Popular culture often portrays the role of the School Nurse as largely involving the application of band-aids and ice packs to scrapes and bruises, or at most making a call home to see if the student can be picked up to receive more familial care. As you’ll quickly find out in this episode, those portrayals have very little contact with the realities of the job.

In practice, the School Nurse is a health service worker dedicated to the care of students while they attend to their studies, social lives and personal development in a whole range of skills and perspectives. The job requires a strong foundation of medical and holistic health knowledge, interpersonal skills, physical and emotional energy, and a whole lot of empathy. School nurses are often the first and best-positioned to identify symptoms and risk-factors in the lives of young people that their teachers, parents and even they themselves may miss. They are crucial to the maintenance of individual and environmental wellness in any school setting, and they deserve a lot more appreciation than they get.

In this episode, Dora and Zoey spoke openly about their backgrounds, motivations, educations, current roles, and views on nursing. Our conversation turned on the following topics:

• The experience of Nursing School
  
• The strength characteristics needed for success in nursing
  
• The nursing shortage in Ontario
  
• The social challenges of teenage life
  
• Healthy vs Toxic Relationships
  
• Having an authentic relationship with yourself
  
• Setting Boundaries
  
• The stages of healthy relationships (Meet, Acquaintance, Friendship, Forward)
  
• Friendship as Mutually Accelerating Disclosure
  
• The signs of Healthy Relationships
  

If you haven’t listened to our previous Podcast click here