Journal of Child Health Care

Children’s nurse educators have to rely predominantly on adult-based literature to guide their educational practice concerning spirituality in the nursing curriculum. The aim of this study was to get a children’s nursing perspective. A questionnaire was designed around the main themes emerging from the adult literature on spirituality. This was distributed to children’s nurses on the undergraduate curriculum at a UK university. The results showed that some of the challenges of delivering spirituality are common to both adult and children’s nursing. However, there were also significant differences revolving around the impact that children and families had in informing students’ understanding of spirituality, and the problems of seeking a unified theory of spirituality in a children’s nursing context. It concludes that children’s nursing has important lessons to learn from the adult literature; however, it must strive to construct its own insights and use this understanding to inform educational approaches to the topic.

This article reports one aspect of a phenomenological study that described the lived experience of mothering a child hospitalized with acute illness or injury. The significance for mothers that nurses do the ‘little things’ emerged in considering the implications of this study’s findings for nurses in practice. Seven mothers whose child had been hospitalized in the 12 months prior to the first interview agreed to share their stories. The resulting data were analysed and interpreted using van Manen’s interpretation of phenomenology. This description of mothering in a context of crisis is useful in the potential contribution it makes to nurses’ understanding of mothers’ experience of the hospitalization of their children. It supports the philosophy of family-centred care and highlights the ability of individual nurses to make a positive difference to a very stressful experience by acknowledging and doing ‘little things’, because it is the little things that matter to the mothers of children in hospital.

Tonsillectomy is one of the most common paediatric surgical procedures. This study aimed to investigate children’s experience of pain and the nonpharmacological strategies that they used to manage pain after tonsillectomy. A further aim was to investigate parental views on these same phenomena. Six children (aged seven to 18 years) and their parents (four mothers and two fathers) were interviewed separately on the day after tonsillectomy. The data were analysed using a qualitative approach. Pain experiences were divided into the categories of physiological pain and psychological pain. Children rated their ‘worst pain’ during the past 24 hours between 6 and 10 (visual analogue scale, 0-10). The non-pharmacological strategies used most frequently to manage pain were thermal regulation (physical method) and distraction (cognitive-behavioural method) according to the framework used. Specific non-pharmacological strategies for pain management relative to different surgical procedures need to be considered.

The teaching of clinical skills within nursing is currently enjoying a resurgence following the implementation of the ‘Fitness for Practice Curriculum’. However, the teaching of clinical skills specifically within children’s nursing has received little attention within the research arena. This article presents the data of a national postal survey sent to United Kingdom institutions providing pre-registration child branch studies, to ascertain the current provision of clinical skills teaching. The findings conclude that very few institutions have invested in specific skills laboratories to teach children’s nursing students. It was also identified that a wide range of clinical skills are taught to child branch students; however, the resources and realism to clinical practice is limited by the lack of specialist children’s skills laboratories or equipment. In conclusion the authors recommend the development of child specific skills laboratories, to augment child branch skills teaching, in order to enhance the realistic simulation of clinical practice.

The examination of both parents’ and nurses’ expectations and attitudes towards parental participation in the care of ill children in a community hospital, non-specialty setting was undertaken in this exploratory, qualitative research study within Australia. First, in this triangulated research study, 14 in-depth interviews with parents were carried out about their participation in the care of their ill children. Content analysis revealed that the four main themes were to do with parental factors including control, expectations, support and emotion; communication; the importance of being with your child; and the fact that mothers do the mothering and nurses do the nursing. Two focus group sessions were held with paediatric nursing staff. Content analysis confirmed real communication problems between nurses and parents. Implications that arose for nursing practice were for in-service workshops to improve communication between nurses and families as well as workshops to prepare students of university nursing programmes offering paediatric electives.