Emotional care in a paediatric ICU: a literature review
The clinical child and adolescent psychologist Sara Miguel Barrena has carried out a literature review on emotional care in paediatric patients.
It is strange to return to issues that do not seem to be a priority in a context such as the current one. What has happened and is happening has been so brutal that it has been difficult to get our heads out of our heads to recover a little of the inertia that was carrying our thoughts, our projects and our plans.
Later on we will try to learn more about how our guests, Quique, Lili, Ruyman, Laura and Seve, part of the nursing staff of the Paediatric ICU of the Hospital Nuestra Señora la Candelaria in Tenerife, have experienced this situation. But now we are releasing what we believe to be one of the most important contents of the work process of our concomitance: a bibliographical review on emotional care in paediatric patients carried out by the clinical child and adolescent psychologist Sara Miguel Barrena.
Sara's work is part of our process in concomitance that led to a meeting we held on 4 February in Santa Cruz de Tenerife where we invited people from different disciplines to reflect on these issues and where she was able to present the first stable version of this document that we are making public today.
The document is divided into 8 sections:
1. Introduction
2. The Paediatric Patient (where we talk about psycho-affective development in childhood, notes on psychosomatics, attachment theory, adolescence, admission to the ICU, emotional stress processes, etc.).
3. The family (focusing especially on emotional defence mechanisms and attributional styles as well as the family as emotional support and different family configurations and how it affects a child under stress).
4. The professional caregiver (discussing the ethics of care, denial of distress, balint groups and therapeutic treatment, among other issues).
5. Family-paediatric patient-healthcare professional intersections (discussing emotional communication dynamics, difficult diagnoses and the theory of mentalisation)
6. Intervention models (citing several concrete examples and their implementation in paediatric ICU contexts)
7. Conclusions and reflections
8. Bibliographical references
We firmly believe that this document can be very useful for health professionals or people researching these issues to reflect on and implement changes in the resources and dynamics of professional environments. as high-tech as paediatric ICUs are.
Literature review of emotional care in paediatric patients - Sara Miguel Barrena (PDF)
