Psychosocial care for seriously injured children and their families: A qualitative study among Emergency Department nurses and physicians
Section snippets
Participants and recruitment
We obtained approval for the study from the Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) of the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne and Monash University. Participants were staff, based in the Emergency Department (ED) of the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne during the period of July 2012–October 2012. Each year, approximately 75,000 children present at the department, 11,000 of whom are admitted to the hospital. Of these admissions, 2000 are injury-related (100–150 with major trauma).
We used
Findings
Five overarching themes emerged: (1) staff find psychosocial issues important but focus on physical care; (2) staff are aware of individual differences but have contrasting views on vulnerability; (3) parents have a central role; (4) staff use a variety of psychosocial strategies to support children, based on instinct and experience but not training; and (5) staff have individually different wishes regarding staff- and self-care.
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Staff find psychosocial issues important but focus on physical care
Discussion
Emergency Department staff play a pivotal role in psychosocial care for injured children. Nevertheless, to our knowledge this is the first in-depth study of nurses’ and physicians’ perspectives on the topic. Its qualitative approach enabled staff's perspectives to be heard in detail, yielding a rich dataset. That we obtained 10 h of staff narrative in a busy ED (with no staff declining interviews) in itself suggests that staff are eager for their views to be heard. The themes that emerged
Conflict of interest statement
This study was partially funded by a Monash University Larkins Fellowship (EA) and the Victorian Government's Operational Infrastructure Support Program. The authors report no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the emergency staff for their participation in this study as well as Jean Bowra, Revathi Krishna, Odilia Laceulle, Nathan Alkemade, Samara Johnson, Thalia Lammers, Sara Nairn, and Alys Manguy for their assistance in the project.
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