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      Gender-based generalisations in school nurses’ appraisals of and interventions addressing students’ mental health

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          Abstract

          Background

          There has been an increase of reports describing mental health problems in adolescents, especially girls. School nurses play an important role in supporting young people with health problems. Few studies have considered how the nurses’ gender norms may influence their discussions.

          Methods

          To investigate this issue, semi-structured interviews focusing on school nurses’ work with students who have mental health problems were conducted. Transcripts of interviews with Swedish school nurses ( n = 15) from the Help overcoming pain early project (HOPE) were analysed using theories on gender as a theoretical framework and then organised into themes related to the school nurses’ provision of contact and intervention. The interviewees were all women, aged between 42–63 years, who had worked as nurses for 13–45 years, and as school nurses for 2–28 years. Five worked in upper secondary schools (for students aged 16–19) and 10 in secondary schools (for students aged 12–16).

          Results

          The results show that school nurses more commonly associated mental health problems with girls. When the school nurses discussed students that were difficult to reach, boys in particular were mentioned. However, very few nurses mentioned specific intervention to address students’ mental health problems, and all of the mentioned interventions were focused on girls. Some of the school nurses reported that it was more difficult to initiate a health dialogue with boys, yet none of the nurses had organized interventions for the boys.

          Conclusions

          We conclude that generalisations can sometimes be analytically helpful, facilitating, for instance, the identification of problems in school nurses’ work methods and interventions. However, the most important conclusion from our research, which applied a design that is not commonly used, is that more varied approaches, as well as a greater awareness of potential gender stereotype pitfalls, are necessary to meet the needs of diverse student groups.

          Electronic supplementary material

          The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1710-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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          Most cited references37

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          Space, Place, and Gender

          The chapters range from studies of the concepts of place employed in debates on uneven regional development and inner-city problems to arguments about the relationship between the conceptualization of space/place and the social construction of gender relations.
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            Gender and power

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              Gender and Mental Health

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                +46 (0)90-7865600 , per-ake.rosvall@umu.se
                stefan.nilsson.4@gu.se
                Journal
                BMC Health Serv Res
                BMC Health Serv Res
                BMC Health Services Research
                BioMed Central (London )
                1472-6963
                30 August 2016
                30 August 2016
                2016
                : 16
                : 1
                : 451
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Applied Educational Science, Umeå University, Per-Åke Rosvall, TUV plan 4, 90187 Umeå, Sweden
                [2 ]Institute of Health Care Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3737-3244
                Article
                1710
                10.1186/s12913-016-1710-1
                5006424
                27576359
                c71b70c7-df96-48e4-9780-f485fbaa2a42
                © The Author(s). 2016

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

                History
                : 22 March 2016
                : 25 August 2016
                Funding
                Funded by: University of Gothenburg Centre for Person-centred Care
                Categories
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2016

                Health & Social care
                gender,school nurses,mental health,secondary schools,upper secondary schools
                Health & Social care
                gender, school nurses, mental health, secondary schools, upper secondary schools

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