The Role of School Nurses in Promoting Positive Sexual Health Education: A Scoping Review.
Bianca Nymo, Sara Berg Eriksen, Anne-Martha Utne Øygarden
PMID 40356460WHAT IT FOUND
School nurses were described as able to broaden sexual health teaching beyond disease prevention, but this scoping review found no standard curriculum and little direct evidence of their effectiveness.
Key findings
01School nurses were reported to have more sexual health knowledge and to teach broader topics than teachers.
02The literature reported a lack of standard sexual education, making effectiveness hard to assess and leaving implementation variable across schools.
03Young people wanted sexual education to include positive topics such as pleasure, desire, relationships, and body image, not only disease prevention.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
This was a scoping review, so it mapped what has been studied but did not test whether sexual education works. The methods state that no methodological quality assessment was performed, so the included studies were not judged for bias or strength. The text is inconsistent about quality assessment, because the limitations section says a quality assessment was conducted. The authors included all types of literature, including commentaries and literature studies, so some findings are opinions or summaries rather than patient results. Only English or Scandinavian-language work was searched, and no funds were available for translations, so relevant work in other languages may have been missed. Reference lists of included articles were not searched, so secondary sources may have been missed. The school nurse role varies by country and school, and there is no international standard for their mandate, so findings may not transfer to every setting. Some included studies did not report participant numbers, some full texts were unavailable, and at least one population was shared across studies.
Declared interests
No conflict-of-interest or funding declaration is provided in the supplied text. The methods state that no funds were available for study translations.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that school nurses have been shown to improve sexual health outcomes. This review did not assess study quality, and the authors report limited direct evidence about nurses' contribution and effectiveness.