School Nursing Service: ChatHealth

The Source

ChatHealth is a service available to young people throughout Suffolk aged 11-19, which lets you text a Suffolk school nurse to ask for confidential help and advice on all kinds of health issues. Including:

• Sexual health
• Emotional health and wellbeing
• Bullying
• Healthy eating
• Smoking, drugs and alcohol
• Self harm
• General health concerns

You can also use this text service to make an appointment with your school nurse.

To find out more about the School Nursing service, you can watch their Youtube video here.

ChatHealth: your school nursing text service
How do I contact a school nurse through the ChatHealth Service?

You can Text a Suffolk school nurse confidentially on 07507 333356.

The service is available Monday to Friday from 9am to 4.30pm, excluding bank holidays.
We aim to reply to you within one working day and you should get an immediate auto-reply message to confirm we received your text.

If you text the number out of these hours, you’ll get a ‘bounce–back’ message that explains where to get help, and a school nurse will get back to you the next working day.

Before using the service, please read the following:

• We do not usually inform your parents, teachers or anyone else if you contact the school nurse. We might inform someone if we are concerned about your safety, but we would speak to you first.
• Your messages are stored and can be seen by other healthcare staff who follow the same confidentiality rules.
• Our text number does not receive voice calls or MMS picture messages.
• We support messaging from UK mobile numbers only (which does not include messages sent from landlines, international mobile numbers and some ‘number masking’ mobile apps).
• You can prevent the school nurse from sending messages to you by texting STOP.
• Please respect your schools mobile phone policy.
• Messages are charged at your usual rate.

Look out for information about ChatHealth around your school or college to find out more.