Assessing Our Referring Hospitals’ Needs for Education about Caring for Neonatal and Pediatric Patients
By Lynn Eidahl
In 2005 and 2006, Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota’s nursing outreach staff made site visits to regional hospitals that refer patients to Children’s. The visits had three goals:
- Introduce each hospital’s nursing leaders to the outreach team.
- Provide information about resources currently available at Children’s to help the hospitals provide the best possible care for infants and children.
- Ask three needs assessment questions.
Follow-up after each visit included matching that hospital’s top priority needs with Children’s current resources.
The needs assessment questions were addressed to each hospital’s nursing leadership (chief nursing officers, nursing education coordinators, nurse managers, clinical educators, and staff nurse leaders). The information below reflects responses to date from 16 of the hospitals:
What are your hospital’s top nursing education needs with regard to caring for neonatal and pediatric patients?
- Pediatric respiratory assessment
- Gastroenteritis: nursing care and interventions
- Pediatric pain management
- Pediatric and neonatal IV starts
- Differences in caring for children vs. adults
- Pediatric orthopedic nursing care
- Newborn respiratory assessment
- General pediatric and newborn assessment
- Pediatric sedation options; nursing care and interventions
- Neonatal transport readiness/stabilization of the troubled newborn
- Hyperbilirubinemia
- Child Life recommendations for procedures
- Minimum recommended equipment to care for pediatric patients (Emergency Department)
- Tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy nursing care
- Pediatric urology nursing care and interventions
What are specific challenges for nurses caring for neonates and pediatric patients at your hospital?
- Methamphetamine use
- Poverty
- Teen pregnancy
- Language and culture: Bosnian, Hispanic, Somali, Russian, Hmong, Vietnamese
- Technology-dependent children seen in the Emergency Department
- Childhood obesity
- Adolescent mental health
Would nurses at your hospital utilize nursing education topics/courses offered on-line by Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota?
All of the nursing leadership groups we have asked this question to date have agreed that their staffs would access on-line education topics as long as the education topics reflect the specific education needs of their nursing staffs. One leadership group stated that their nursing staff did not yet have internal access to the Internet, but they expected access to be available within a year, and then would be interested in on-line education through Children’s.
Lynn Eidahl, RN, MA, is Outreach Nurse Liaison at Children’s.
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