TYLER, Texas (KLTV) - East Texas school nurses participated in a hands-on "boot camp" offering a refresher course built around realistic clinical emergencies and classroom constraints.

More than 30 school nurses from across the region participated in a summer session about altered mental states, Jessica Conrad, a clinical nursing instructor at the University of Texas at Tyler, said Friday."There are a lot of different situations where a student might be on campus that could affect altered mental status," she said.

"The scenarios we're going through today include concussion, hypoglycemic events, overdose and or drug use, as well as just injury or things like that."Nurses rotated through classroom-based simulations in pairs, facing surprise scenarios, and volunteers served alongside nursing students as standardized patients."There was a need in Northeast Texas for continuing education opportunities for school nurses," Dr. Jodi Bullard, an assistant professor of nursing at UT Tyler, said.