Health problems experienced by parents of children in long-term hospital stay

Abstract

Introduction: Nowadays, parental active engagement in children' hospitalization has become an accepted feature. However, parental finance, social and personal costs for their involvement in their child's care have received little attention. Moreover, a child's hospitalization is, frequently, an event that occurs, unexpectedly, having a significative impact on parents' health. There is a positive relationship between parental anxiety and the length of the child's hospital admission. Aim: To synthesize and analyse the existing evidence on the health problems experienced by parents of children in a long-term hospital stay. Method: An integrative review was carried out, and scientific articles were selected from the databases MEDLINE, SciELO and CINAHL. Only parents of children (with ages between 0 and 18 years) submitted to longterm hospitalizations were included. Parents with any kind of mental or psychiatric disorder were excluded from the review. A six-step method was used to develop the revision and to analyse the results. Results: A child's hospital stay holds major changes in the routines and well-being of a family. Parents are in need of care from nurses whose primary focus are children. Children' hospitalization often leads to parental anxiety as well as stress and sleep disorders. This condition can also trigger other pathologies such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes mellitus type II or stroke. Anxiety has higher rates on mothers of male infants. Conclusion: A long-term child´s hospitalization brings an important and challenging parental adjustment affecting their health and wellbeing. Thereby, nurses' interventions should focus on identifying the adversities experienced by parents, so that actions can be taken that will improve the adaptation process, and consequently promote the parents' well-being in addition to their children's healing process. To this point, meeting family-centred care expectations is an additional paediatrics'