ArticlePrevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research2023
Costs and Effects of School-Based Licensed Practical Nurses on Elementary Student Attendance and Chronic Absenteeism.
Article in Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 8 citations in OpenAlex.
- Public health interventions aimed at children aged 5-19 years funded by local authorities in England: a scoping review of economic analyses.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Perceptions on the Implementation of a School Nursing Pilot Programme in the Canary Islands.Nursing reports (Pavia, Italy) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 substantial incremental costs of $68,228 per school, the presence of a full-time LPN was associated with at best negligible improvements, and at worst slight disimprovements, in attendance and chronic absenteeism. We recommend a careful review of the theory of change for LPN-based school nursing programs to clarify the specific inputs and activities that are expected to lead to improved student outcomes. Education agencies should develop explicit assignment, training, monitoring, and auditing plans to ensure LPNs are equitably distributed and that their activities are aligned with the theory of change. Education agencies should also explore whether expanded Medicaid billing can reduce their share of the nursing cost burden.
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