Costs and Effects of School-Based Licensed Practical Nurses on Elementary Student Attendance and Chronic Absenteeism.

ABSTRACT: Despite increasing reliance on licensed practical nurses (LPNs) to provide health services in schools, we do not know whether this is a cost-effective prevention strategy against student absenteeism. Therefore, we evaluated the costs and effectiveness of an LPN-based school nursing program for improving attendance and chronic absenteeism at a large, urban school district in the southeastern USA. We first identified a matched set of 46 elementary schools (23 nurse, 23 no-nurse) by using an optimal multilevel matching algorithm based on student- and school-level characteristics. We then conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis on the matched set, using the ingredients method to estimate societal costs and multilevel regression to estimate effects. The results indicated that despite substantia

SUBMITTER: Leach SM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9670058 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature