I work in a nursing home and a lot of nurses are saying that its hard to be a pediatric nurse. I love nursing and I have always wanted to be a pediatric nurse, since I was a little tyke.
Any thoughts on what I can do to make a great pediatric nurse ? Or a better nursing assistant?
Amanda
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October 28th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I just started in pediatric nursing, and had the opportunity to serve on a combination med/surg / pedi unit during clinicals, here are some random tips I picked up:
In an inpatient setting, all invasive or painful procedures should be done in a treatment room, NOT the bed they’ll be sleeping in overnight. This seems obvious but a lot of experienced nurses forget this or just don’t know (it’s basic “sleep hygiene”, you don’t want them to associate their “safe place” with fear or pain). If you see an IV therapy nurse, for example, prepare to stick your patient in their hospital bed, politely redirect them to the treatment room.
All of that developmental psychology we got in nursing school suddenly takes on a huge amount of importance. In school, I got to watch a pediatric APRN use a series of clever techniques to eliminate age-related interferences from her assessments. For example, young children may not understand or comply with your direction to take a deep breath for resp assessments, so just give them a glove to blow up like a balloon and auscultate then. If a teen is resisting your range-of-motion assessment of a painful joint, distract them with conversation to see if they’re resisting because it’s painful or the joint itself is resisting because of damage.
Understanding of the developmental stage of the patient is important, as is the understanding that hospitalization may temporarily cause a child to regress to an earlier stage of development (for example, wetting/soiling in a potty-trained child). Understanding the context of these behaviors and responding to them appropriately will save you and your patient a lot of anguish.
This are just examples, and I’m relatively new at this. If you want to get into peds nursing, find someone who’s really good at it and learn from them. Pay attention to how peds nurses interact with their patients, I think you’ll find the most important ones are aware of developmentally appropriate communication strategies for each age group and refrain from being overly coercive, while still establishing firm boundaries and limits on behavior.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Always remember that you are taking care of parents and family members as well as the pediatric patient. Listening to the parents of chronically-ill children really aids in the care that you can give and makes you as a nurse more trustworthy. Children have routine and the hospital is very disruptful, so I try as much as possible to keep the schedule of the day close to their home schedule. You MUST be a patient advocate in order to do this! Good luck! I would never do anything but Peds – it’s my love!