Chronic Illness Each child will probably have many different kind of health issue during his or her infancy or childhood. In addition, for some children these illnesses are mild, they come and go, and they do not have negative influence on their everyday life and development. On the other hand, for some children, there are some chronic illnesses that have a huge effect on their daily life during childhood. Indeed, a chronic health condition is a health issue that last more than 3 months, and it has a big effect on on a child’s daily life, activity, and development. As a result, it demands more hospitalizations, extensive medical care, emergency care, and/or home health care. According to Weiner, “Each year in the US, 6 million children ranging …show more content…
from newborns to 17-year-olds are the average length of stay for those patients is approximately 3-4 days” (Hockenberry, 2015. pg. 761). Learning and dealing with a chronic illness can be very difficult and challenging for affected child and his or her family. Consequently, there are some issues and needs of the child and family experiencing a chronic condition. Some of these issues involve cultural issues, developmental needs, trends in care, coping patterns, family adjustment and/or adaptive tasks. The possible intervention between normally developed and chronically ill children are very different, so it differs with the specific characteristics of the disease, the child, parents, and family. Even though there are many variation aspects, main goal is giving maximum care to improve their quality of life. In fact, giving highest quality care of these chronically ill children and families depends on teaching, support, and information of the risks to regular development that are normally should be dealt by these children at each stage of their growth and development. In addition, doctors, nurses, caregivers, and other health care providers have the responsibility to advocate for children with a chronic health condition. In fact, it helps the child and family to deal with this challenging and stressful condition, and be ready to be faced to their adulthood with strength, confidence, and security. Such encouragement needs an understanding of children's development, knowledge about condition and the effects of disease on that stages, and effective interaction and communication with both children and families. Moreover, assessment of family development is one of the important approaches of the development. The family life stages depend on the changing ages, external demands, and life conditions. A diagnosis of the chronic illness in a child may affect each member of the family. Depending on the life cycle changes, families can deal with their child’s chronic condition differently. Family members may struggle with their own feeling while dealing with the child diagnosis, they may feel anger, disappointment, guilt, and grief of loss.
Also, the whole family needs to come to term with the health condition, make change in priorities and schedule, and keep the family. For example, it can be much more stressful for a young or a newly married couple because they may have more experience to overcome life's difficulties. As a result, as with individual maturation, family development can be delayed or even revert to a previous level of functioning (Hockenberry, p 762.) Therefore, health care providers need to apply family development theory while planning care for a child and family with chronic health condition. Indeed, family centered care should be a part of that intervention. Parents and family members have huge and comprehensive caregiving responsibilities for their chronically ill child at home or at hospital. Moreover, the main goal taking care of chronic ill child is to “minimize the progression of the disease and maximize the child’s physical, cognitive, psychological potential” (Hockenberry, p 763). Therefore, it is essential to family being part of the child care to give highest quality of care. On the other hand, we are as a part of the health care provider need to give attention to all …show more content…
family members, not only ill child. For that reason, our responsibility is to educate parents, provide information about child’s condition, respect family’s individuality, encourage them being attentive, and support them during their difficult time. Indeed, support is one of the important interventions to help family and a child for coping development. Furthermore, when parents become more knowledgeable about their child’s health condition and needs, they are going to gain more confidence which has a good impact on coping mechanism too. Likewise, parents should help and support their child to learn new ways to adapt with the special challenges of chronic disease. We should allow and encourage each family members to be attentive in any way that they are able. It improves their self-esteem and promote further development during home care too. Although, home care is more challenging than hospital care, with appropriate teaching and support, families may achieve complicated treatment and procedures in the home. Another important approaches of development of the chronically ill child is normalization which is implementing a normal pattern of living. As I mentioned above, parents should make major change in priorities and schedules because of responsibility taking care of a child with special needs. To normalize and keep in balance everything, daily routines of the child with health problem should be adapted to a family’s schedule. Family should organize their time to regress their previous normal life schedule. Mainstreaming is one of the main aspect of normalization too. Going to school or day care gives important opportunity for socialization with other children; it allows for children with special needs to achieve a sense of self. Furthermore, early intervention is important to keep the family on track; so it provides information about child's current level of development, additional support services, and family needs for improving development. Early intervention includes maintained effort to help disabled and developmentally delayed young children from birth to three year old. Finally, when we are as a health care member planning intervention for chronic ill children, we need to pay more attention for cultural aspects too. In addition, different cultural beliefs, customs, and traditions can be a barrier to effective treatment, teaching, and communication. Although, it is challenging to care culturally diverse patient, it is health care providers responsibility to provide the patients’ needs by initiating diversity management. During my pediatric clinical rotation I had many patients with at least one or two chronic health condition.
In addition, one of them was 10 year old girl, who was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Patient was a young girl, from different culture and religion, and parents had language barrier; however, while taking care of the child, I could see that family had really good interaction with each other. Parents were at bedside all the time, and they were very supportive and attentive. Patient and family did well with diabetic care. The mother was participated in cares and eager to learn. Moreover, to provide highest quality of care, nurses did a lot of great job. They provided information about the child’s chronic illness and taught about insulin administration. Consequently, from caring that patient I understood that most important nursing interventions are to assess patient's ability to copy with new life and role change, patient’s reaction to chronic illness, support system, cultural issues, and available
resources. Work Cited Hockenberry, M. J., & Wilson, D. (2015). Wong's Nursing Care of Infants and Children (10th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Mosby/Elsevier. P. 771-774
...concerns appropriate interventions were assigned to each one. For the priority concern of the family’s ability to cope and their risk of depression commendation and interventative questioning were the chosen interventions. For the priority concern of Gilberts care giver burnout and risk for compassion fatigue commendation and encouraging respite were chosen. The Grape family is a fitting example of the complex difficulties a family can have when they are faced with the difficulty of dealing with a chronic illness and tragedy. This paper demonstrates the importance of assessing and creating interventions for a family in a way which includes every member of the family not only the ones with complications. Raising the question should patients who are suffering from chronic illnesses better off to be treated as an individual or as a member of a functional family unit?
Family health is receiving substantial attention in the contemporary decades, following a growing number of unpredicted health issues. Family health assessments have become common techniques within the health care systems across the world to promote good health. Nursing Family assessment and intervention models have been developed in to assists nurses and families to identify the family issues and develop the best.
The Calgary Family Assessment Model (CFAM) is a well-known comprehensive and multidimensional template used by nurses to assess families. CFAM begins by having the nurse visit with the family and gain insight on the family’s functioning at a particular point in time. Interviewing the family allows the nurse to assess and identify potential issues. Furthermore, the CFAM consists of three main assessment categories, known as structural, developmental, and functional. Each of these categories contains several subcategories that allow the nurse to examine all aspects of a family’s functioning. The goal of the CFAM is for the nurse to openly discuss family issues, provide insight to families from an outside perspective and guide them towards their own problem solving tactics. CFAM allows families and nurse to develop a plan of care that is mutually agreed upon. The following paper illustrates a family assessment completed using the CFAM and applies nursing diagnoses and interventions relevant to the family’s current issues (Wright & Leahey, 2013).
Chronic illness issues can include managing their illness, the cost of taking care of the illness, etc. Many people who suffer from a chronic illness suffer a lot trying to manage their illness on a daily basis. According to a website called NCOA.org, “About 80% of older adults have one chronic disease. 68.4% of Medicare beneficiaries have two or more chronic diseases and 36.4% have four or more. Chronic diseases can affect a person’s ability to perform important activities, restricting their engagement in life and their enjoyment of family and friends”
Chronic illness can consist of a single or multiple illnesses that last over a period of time (Kaakinen, Coehlo, Steele, Tabacco, & Hansen, 2015). For this assignment, I will choose a chronic illness that could affect a patient in my nursing practice. I will discuss three ways I could promote the health of the patient and the family dealing with the chronic illness. I will end this discussion with a conclusion.
Treating the patient and family as one, can have improved outcomes, decrease hospital stays, increased patient satisfaction, and improved reimbursements for the hospital. Developing a relationship with not only the patient, but family as well, can pay off in the long run by providing better communication, better quality of care, and trust. The patient and family can be strong advocates for improved performance improvement efforts. Including family in the treatment of the patient treats the “whole” patient through their hospitalization. Involving the family can enhance the patients care.
The Family-Centered approach to care is important to the delivery of behavioral health services for children and adolescents because it involves the families in their natural environments and allows the families to make decisions about their care. It promotes home and community based care by creating an equal partnership with the family to ensure optimal delivery of care at all levels (Brewer, McPherson, Magrab, & Hutchins, 1989). For children with special health care needs, such as mental or developmental disorders, coordinating care between all services and people can help to introduce flexible and reasonable ways of providing the maximum amount of care to children and families (Brewer, McPherson, Magrab, & Hutchins, 1989).
... the context of chronic illness: a family health promoting process. Journal of Nursing and Healthcare of Chronis Illness 3, (3), 283-92.
1996 Sep; Vol 19(3): 481-493. · Tak,-Youngran, (1995). Family stress, perceived social support, and coping of family who has a child with chronic illness. Dissertation-Abstracts-International:-Section-B:-The-Sciences-and-Engineering.
Pediatric care is extremely individualized with the treatment plan for each child, families are highly encouraged to participate in goal setting, and the type of care is proactive with the intention of family-centered education (DiMarco & Kolcaba, 2005). The comfort theory can be intervened with all age groups. Some interventions that may be used to comfort a child or family during a stressful time are social, psychospiritual, environmental, and physical (Dimarco & Kolcaba, 2005). An example of each are; social, avoidance of using the word pain, psychospiritual, during a simple procedure you may have the parent present, environmental, utilization of a treatment room instead of the patients room, and physical, comfort of the patient with procedures and in bed (DiMarco & Kolcaba, 2005). Comfort is able to provide the patient with a positive outcome that encourage them and their families to commit themselves to health-seeking behaviors (DiMarco & Kolcaba,
Wittenberg, E., Saada, A., & Prosser, L. (2013). How illness affects family members: A qualitative interview survey. The Patient: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, 6(4), 257-268. doi:10.1007/s40271-013-0030-3
Family-centred care can be defined as the collective efforts between the health care providers and family in making informed healthcare decisions thus ensuring optimal health care delivery. The general principles of family-centred care are; Information sharing, Respect and honoring differences, Partnership and collaboration, Negotiation, Care in context of family and community. Evidence shows that family-centred care helps in the following ways such as ; - It leads to efficient use of resources and support health, transition and cost containment.
There are many ways to categorize illness and disease; one of the most common is chronic illness. Many chronic illnesses have been related to altered health maintenance hypertension and cardiovascular diseases are associated with diet and stress, deficient in exercise, tobacco use, and obesity (Craven 2009). Some researchers define the chronic illness as diseases which have long duration and generally slow development (WHO 2013); it usually takes 6 month or longer than 6 month, and often for the person's life. It has a sluggish onset and eras of reduction for vanishing the symptoms and exacerbation for reappear the symptoms. Some of chronic illness can be directly life-threatening. Others remain over time and need intensive management, such as diabetes, so chronic illness affects physical, emotional, logical, occupational, social, or spiritual functioning. Chronic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes, all of these diseases are the cause of mortality in the world, representing 63% of all deaths. So a chronic illness can be stressful and may change the way a person l...
During the placement in mental health ward, the student nurse observed the administration of subcutaneous insulin, which the student nurse never done it during the previous placements. Initial discussion of diabetic disease condition and insulin administration procedure were felicitated; because of the student nurse did not prepare adequately, made me to discuss with the student nurse about the diabetic disease and importance of insulin administration in depth.
When a nurse is providing patient care, he/she creates a safe environment for the patient and enables the choice to establish a relationship on a human to human interaction or on a transpersonal level. The patient will be acknowledged as a person with the wholeness of their soul despite their illness or number on the bed. The ten carative factors in this theory are used as an education tool for nurses around the world and should be applied to the different care situations in practice. Nurses use the factors to promote growth in themselves and within the patient. A nurse should respect the patient’s decisions and take the time to fully be present in the moments with the patient. A lot of nurses complain about the time limitations they have and do not provide the necessary amount of time to listen and gather the patient’s perspective of the situation. Another way this theory can be applied to practice is by recognizing the caring moment between you and the patient. This will determine how the relationship will