What is Pediatric Nursing?
Pediatric nursing is a specialized area of nursing practice concerning the care of neonates, infants, and children during wellness and illness. In pediatric nursing includes preventive, promoted, curative, and rehabilitative care for children. Pediatric nursing emphasizes the all-around development of the body mind and spirit of the growing individual. Thus, pediatric nursing involves giving assistance, care, and support to the growing and developing children to achieve their individual potential for functioning with the fullest capacity.
Pediatric nursing is a field of nursing that understands the children are not small adults, that their needs are unique and important, and that there is no more important work in our species than safeguarding our future generations. From primary care to critical care, nurses are the backbone of pediatric nursing care.
Goals of Pediatric Nursing:
There are some key goals of pediatric nursing, which are presented below:
- To provide skillful, intelligent, need-based comprehensive care to the children in health and sickness.
- To interpret the basic need of the children to their parents and family members and to guide them in childcare.
- To promote growth and development, of children towards an optimum state of health for functioning at the peak of their capacity in the future.
- To prevent disease and alleviate suffering in children.
General Principles of Pediatric Nursing:
Pediatric nursing requires knowledge of normal psychomotor, psychomotor, psychosocial, cognitive growth, and development, as well as of the health problems and needs of people in this age group. Preventive care and anticipatory guidance are integral to the practice of nursing. Some important principles of pediatric nursing are pointed out in the following that needed to become a pediatric nurse.
- Competent the pediatric nurse in promoting continuity of care by providing primary care.
- Be able to gather essential and accurate information during history taking including relevant illness, past medical, family, social, diet, and developmental history.
- To provide excellent clinical experience in the management of pediatric patients of all ages with a broad spectrum of illnesses and injuries.
- Able to perform the necessary skills to resuscitate and describe the initial stabilization of the critically ill child.
- To competent the pediatric nurses in basic life support skills (appropriate implementation of oxygen delivery devices and demonstration of bag-mask ventilation) and placement of peripheral intraosseous and intravenous catheters.
- To achieve basic competency in advanced airway skills (intubation) and advanced intravenous access skills (central venous catheter placement and arterial line placement).
- To understand the pathophysiology and treatment of common medical disorders such as respiratory failure, shock, neurologic critical care, renal failure, and liver failure.
- To understand the indications, perioperative management, and complications of the common surgical condition such as congenital heart disease, trauma, ENT, orthopedic, neurosurgical, and solid organ transplant.
- Be competent inappropriately interpreting lab values and studies commonly used in inpatient pediatrics, taking into account age-related normal values.
- To train nurses in the recognition, evaluation, and management of pediatric physical and sexual abuse.
- To understand the importance of psychosocial issues related to the care of critically ill or dying children.
- To Understand the ethical and legal issues which emerge during the care of critically ill and/or dying children.
- Be competent in understanding cost-effective inpatient care by discussing issues of cost and access when relevant to individual patient situations.
- To facilitate good working relationships with colleagues and consultants by promoting a collegial environment.
- To provide experience in teaching and supervising staff and colleagues and provide opportunities for pediatric nurses to acquire skills in an oral presentation, medical writing, and research design.
- To understand techniques for enteral and parenteral nutritional supplementation in the pediatric patient.
- To build a working relationship with the parents and their children from the time of the first contact with them.
- The nurse will be aware that all behaviors of the child are meaningful and accept the parents and children exactly as they are.
- The pediatric nurse will be empathetic for the parents and children.
- The nurse should let the parents and children know that their problems are important and the nurse is there to aid in the solution of those problems.
- The nurse must be willing to acknowledge the parents’ rights to the decision concerning their children.
- The nurse allows the parents and children to express their emotions and even negative emotions.
- The nurse should ask questions limited to a single idea or reference so that it is easy for the parents and child to understand what is being asked.
- The nurse should speak in a language that the parents and child can understand.
- The members of a team must make the parents feel that they are working collaboratively for the treatment of their child.
Maria Khatun Mona is a Founder and Editor of Nursing Exercise Blog. She is a Nursing and Midwifery Expert. Currently she is working as a Registered Nurse at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has great passion in writing different articles on Nursing and Midwifery. Mail her at “[email protected]”
