Ask any school nurse what they want more of and the answer is almost always the same: more time with children. Too often, though, that time is swallowed up by admin. Yet a lot of digital tools built for school health services solve the wrong problem. They take a paper process and put it on a screen, without asking whether the process itself was ever right in the first place.
That distinction matters more than it might seem.
Digitising is not the same as simplifying
A form that used to be filled in on paper and is now filled in on a tablet is still the same form. The fields are the same, the double-checking is the same, the time spent typing instead of talking is the same. In some cases it takes longer, because now there is a login screen, a sync delay, or a system that times out halfway through a school visit.
None of this is malicious. It is simply what happens when software is designed around a checklist of features rather than around the shape of a nurse’s day. A tool can tick every box on a specification and still leave practitioners with less time for the part of the job that actually helps children.
What genuine time-back looks like
That could mean:
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Cohort lists and consent data that are ready before the nurse arrives, rather than assembled on the day
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One entry point for a result that updates every system that needs it, instead of the same information typed three times
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Follow-up and referral steps that trigger automatically, so nobody has to remember to chase them
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A record of who has and hasn’t been seen, without a separate spreadsheet running alongside the “real” system
Each of these removes a step. None of them just moves a step onto a screen.
Why this matters right now
School nursing teams are already stretched. The RCN‘s recent reporting on school nursing capacity makes this plain, and the NHS 10 Year Plan is asking these same teams to do more, earlier, and closer to communities. Against that backdrop, software that adds five minutes of screen time per child is not a neutral choice. It is a direct trade against contact time, at exactly the moment that contact time is under the most pressure.
The question worth asking of any new tool is not “does this replace our paper form?” but “does this give a nurse their afternoon back?” If the honest answer is no, it is worth asking why.
Built around the job, not the checklist
This is the standard we hold ourselves to. Every feature we build starts with a simple test: does this remove a step for the person doing the screening, or does it just move that step somewhere else? If we can’t answer yes, it doesn’t go in.
If you’d like to see what that looks like in practice, we’d be glad to show you.