Nurses’ perceptions regarding importance of parental participation in their hospitalized child’s therapeutic-nursing and training care.

The aim of this study was to identify nursing staff’s perceptions regarding the importance of parental participation in their hospitalized child’s therapeutic-nursing and training needs of care. Material- Method The study was conducted in the inpatient pediatric medical and surgical wards of the two Children’s Hospital of Athens, where one hundred and sixty members of the nursing staff were eligible for the study. For this purpose a special questionnaire was designed which the sample answered anonymously by being interviewed by the researchers. Nursing staff rated the importance of each activity from parental participation, ranging "extremely important", "very important", "fairly important", "little important", and "not important". The statistical analysis was performed by the SPSS package. Results The 79.2% of the participants perceived parental participation regarding child’s therapeutic-nursing needs as very important. A high percentage of nurses, 94.3%, perceived extremely important and very important parental participation in the training care of the child, particularly parents doctors and parents nurses communication for the caring needs of the child when the child leave the hospital and to the house. More men perceived parental participation regarding child's therapeutic- nursing needs as not important (P=0.024). The older the nurses were the more important they thought the parental participation in training and education in child's care (P=0.043) and the oldest nurses perceived that the parents should stay next to the hospitalized child (P=O.OOI). Conclusions Although a fairly high number of nurses expressed explicit support for the parental participation in their hospitalized child’s therapeutic-nursing and training care, still continue to exist a number of them who expressed different perceptions.

Keywords: Parents, hospitalized child, nurse, perceptions, therapeutic, educational activities