Pediatric nursing
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In today's health care environment, pediatric nurses are being called upon to perform humanitarian missions in tropical developing countries. During these missions, pediatric nurses often are faced with providing short-term health care to children in the villages of the developing countries visited. ⋯ To date, health care delivery plans for pediatric nurses as part of an interdisciplinary team on these missions are unavailable. This article provides literature and experience-based guidance for pediatric nurses performing humanitarian missions around the world in tropical developing countries to provide care in a manner that is safe, appropriate, and offers the greatest likelihood of benefit to the children in these countries.
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Telephone care is a flourishing subspecialty of nursing requiring adaptations of bedside nursing skills and expertise in communication and telephone competencies. Telephone health care is more than "just answering the phone," even for the most experienced nurse. Knowledge of the unique skills, techniques, protocols, and legal considerations is essential in performing safe and accurate telephone triage.
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Evaluating and improving the practice of family-centered care involves planning the evaluation effort collaboratively with families, gathering information from a variety of audiences, investigating the different arenas of family-centered care, following growth in family-centered practice over time, using a variety of evaluation approaches, and integrating evaluation with efforts to change toward family-centered approaches to care. Resources available to guide the evaluation effort include guidelines for reviewing written materials in a unit, program, clinic, or practice; written surveys and checklists; guidelines for focus groups or interviews; suggestions for using health care scenarios to gather information about family-centered approaches to care; and questions for nurses to use to reflect on their own practice.
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The purpose of this study was to describe nurses' perceptions of their practices in the assessment and management of pain in children. Questionnaires were distributed to 260 nurses in a pediatric hospital in the western United States. Results showed that nurses are not consistently assessing pain in children, and pain management practices are not based on systematic assessment. ⋯ Children experience a variety of painful procedures during hospitalization, but nurses reported that they are not consistently administering analgesics for painful procedures. Although rarely used, distraction and relaxation techniques were the most frequently reported nonpharmacological interventions. Although nurses did not feel that there were factors preventing them from assessing or managing pain in children, their practices revealed both that they are not using developmentally appropriate tools for assessing pain, and they have not maximized the use of management strategies for controlling pain.