The opinions of private and public school teachers regarding school nurses

To compare the opinions of teachers in private and public schools about school nurses.

This descriptive study was conducted at 10 randomly selected private and public schools in Izmir in western Turkey during April-May 2016, and comprised teachers who consented to participate. A questionnaire was used to collect the data about socio-demographic information of the subjects (six questions), problems frequently encountered in school and the teachers' opinions about school health nurses (seven questions). Two open-ended questions on the roles of school nurses and the most important health education topics were asked. SPSS 22 was used to analyse data.

Of the 720 subjects, 517(72%) were females and 203(18%) were men. There were 360(50%) teachers from private schools and an equal number were from the public schools. The mean ages of the teachers from the private and public schools were 36.22±8.69 and 43.12±7.78 years, respectively. Besides, 337(93.6%) teachers of the private schools and 338(93.9%) teachers of the public school believed that school nurses were needed, while 19(5.3%) private school teachers and 162(45%) public school teachers said they had "no idea" about the roles of the school nurse. The most important role of the school nurse was promoting good health habits according to the public school teachers and health education according to the private school teachers.

Half of the public school teachers said they had no idea about the role of a school nurse.