Abstract
Introduction: Nurses are in an ideal position to provide special care for anxious children admitted in hospital wards. Thus, the objectives of the study were to identify the common nursing procedures done for children and to measure their level of anxiety. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted at a district hospital in Philippines. The respondents of the study were 235 children aged 3 – 9 years old admitted in the pediatric ward. The descriptive characteristics of the children were recorded. Venham Picture Test was used to assess the level of anxiety in children. The instrument was validated using the Good and Scates criteria and pre-tested on 30 pediatric respondents. The chi-square test and t-test were used to determine the significance of difference between the scores given by the children across different age groups and the P-value was set at 0.05. Results: The mean age of the respondents was 5.1 (3.5) years. Males obtained an "average" mean score of anxiety 4.0 (2.0) whilst females demonstrated a "low" mean score of anxiety 3.6 (2.3). There was a highly statistical difference between the mean anxiety scores amongst patients who had a prior experience and those who had none. Conclusion: Temperature measurement and pulse measurement were the most common procedures performed on children and demonstrated very low level of anxiety. Peripheral cannula insertion caused the maximum anxiety amongst all the procedures performed. Children aged 3 to 4 years old demonstrated the maximum anxiety when compared to children aged 5 to 9 years.
Highlights
Nurses are in an ideal position to provide special care for anxious children admitted in hospital wards
The highest number of respondents belonged to the 3 year old group (n=83, 35.3%) while the 6 year old group had the least number of respondents (n=11, 4.7%) (Table 1)
Temperature measurement and pulse measurement were the most common procedures performed on children and demonstrated very low level of anxiety
Summary
Nurses are in an ideal position to provide special care for anxious children admitted in hospital wards. Providing extra care for every child would be time consuming and may undermine the child’s own coping skills This raises difficulties for nurses in implementing procedures and can cause delay in the treatment and care. The nurse may not be able to perform the intervention at all Identifying those children who need additional attention and those procedures that induce high level of anxiety in children would be advantageous. It will reduce the time required to perform the procedure and facilitate in improving the efficiency of the nurse
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