The Nursing Implications for Hospitalized Pediatric Patient, Essay Example

The article I have selected for review is entitled “Children With Complex Chronic Conditions in Inpatient Hospital Settings in the United States” because it is important for nurses and other healthcare professionals to understand the different needs and interactions of medications in young children compared to adults, especially in those with complex chronic conditions. A large majority of clinical trials for medication approval by the Food and Drug Administration are conducted in adults due to the difficulty of justifying trials for this younger patient population. As a consequence, nurses must ensure they review the pediatric patient’s record and use the correct interview questions in order to fully understand the patient’s situation and medications that he or she has taken in the past. Since the pediatric patient may not be fully aware of the medications that he or she has taken, it would also be useful for the nurse to consult the patient’s parents in the interview if possible. It is often necessary to assess the efficacy of treatments given to these patients in order to fully understand whether the combination of treatments is useful for the complex illness.

The goal of the study itself was to determine whether “CCC hospitalizations are associated with attributes that are consistent with heightened medical complexity” (Simon et al., 2010). To do so, the team performed a retrospective study examining several databases and used factors including hospital admissions, length of stay, total charges, technology-assistance procedures, and mortality risk to assess for medical complexity. Researchers found that CCC’s accounted for about 42% of deaths. As a result, it’s important for nurses to find better ways to pinpoint the exact symptoms and root causes of these symptoms that CCC patient’s exhibit because doing so could prevent many unnecessary deaths. It would be potentially useful for groups of nurses to discuss the matter so as to reach the most probable conclusion regarding the case.

References

Simon TD, Berry J, Feudtner C, Stone BL, Sheng X, Bratton SL, Dean JM, Srivastava R. (2010). Children With Complex Chronic Conditions in Inpatient Hospital Settings in the United tates. Pediatrics. Retrieved from http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/126/4/647.short