California schools are no longer allowed to let school staffers other than licensed nurses to give diabetic students their insulin injections, under a Superior Court ruling issued Friday.
But the ruling will have no impact on San Diego Unified: It already bans anyone but a licensed nurse from giving the shots, said Nursing and Wellness Program Manager Jennifer Gorman. She was recently honored by the California School Nurses Organization, which opposed a California Department of Education settlement that allowed trained, unlicensed staffers to administer insulin.
I was curious about how San Diego Unified handled the insulin shots, especially at schools where a nurse is not available some days of the week. Gorman explained that itinerant nurses stop into the schools to give scheduled shots and help students count carbohydrates.
“If some unlicensed person gets one of those calculations wrong it could be very dangerous for the child,” Gorman said. “The law backs up that they really don’t have the assessment skills they would need to do that.”
School nurses were among the employees threatened by budget cuts last year, but a staffer from the nursing and wellness department said no nurses were ultimately laid off. San Diego Unified is bracing for another budget shortfall this year.