Health visitor or school nurse training

[Chloejames03]

Hi all, I am new to this so I hope I’m doing this right!

I am a qualified Mental Health Nurse (band 6, 8 years experience). I would really like to train to become a health visitor but I am so confused!!

I have an interview for a trainee health visitor and a trainee school nurse. Both appear to be the same course so do you qualify as both? It seems odd that say I did the course for health visitor and later on decided to do school nursing I would have to complete the same course again?

Hope this all make sense!

Any interview tips would be greatly welcomed too 😉

Anyone? Lol

In my experience, school nurse is a health visitor. Health visitor is the qualification and school nurse is a job a health visitor can do.

They both come under the "specialist community public health nursing" part of the NMC register.l, but there are two different course streams, one for school nursing and one for HV. They are effectively two different courses.

They are different as Phoenix said above. Word of warning, I applied for both and was asked to chose one, and if I didn’t have a preference, then it may not be the right time for me. I found this a little patronising, as it very much was the right time. Anyway I chose one, and didn’t get an interview for either. I’m going to come back to it in a few years.

Both SCPHN course but not the same qualification. There is a transfer of fields course though that either can do after SCPHN to work as the other and some trusts will expect you to do this as well if they run a 0-19 service. I was a HV and the SCPHN course was the hardest and most stressful year of my life! Good luck.

Word of warning OP, it is very competitive. My DSis applied and was interviewed 3 times before she got accepted. It was 18 months training and the worst time of her life. She doesn't get any better paid than her previous band 6 nursing job but the big plus is 9-5 working day and good potential for going PT.

My friend is a school nurse. She is not nor has never been a health visitor.
She also has 4 (out of 6) vacant places in her area which they can't fill.