Promoção da esperança da criança com doença crónica e família

Abstract

Pediatric Nursing is nowadays a major challenge in health care; particularly when it comes to a child experiencing a chronic illness. According to the General Directorate of Health (2018), chronic diseases comprise a large percentage of the total illnesses in our country, whether in childhood or adolescence. The family life of this child and their family is certainly modified as a consequence of the constant requirements of the chronic condition, often leading to familiar crisis where the family itself, as the main informal caregiver, experience physical and mental burnout, social isolation and despair; which leads to the need for specialized care, particularly in the affective and relational scope. Thus, the paediatric client and their family need privileged attention and care from the nurse, being that their intervention must be directed to each variable which affect the health-sickness process’s responses; it’s also essential for the nurse to promote suffering relief, becoming, this way, a hope promoter. This being said, Child and Youth Health Nursing has been facing great challenges regarding the increase of average life expectancy, morbidity, chronic illnesses and number of children with some disability or with a developmental delay (OE, 2011), therefore recognizing the complexity of chronically ill children’s care, the families’ needs and the importance of Hope in nursing care; thus it was defined as the main purpose of this professional and academic path: the development of skills of Specialist Nurse in Child and Pediatric Health (SNCPH) in the scope of The Promotion of hope for Children with Chronic Illness and their Family. To sustain this report it was used as a theoretical reference Jean Watson’s Theory of Transpersonal Caring and Zaida Charepe’s Model for Intervention in Mutual Help-Promoter of Hope – MIAMPE (2011); complementing with a scoping review elaborated during this academic process. During this journey, internships were conducted in three different contexts, which were later thoroughly analysed according to the goals and activities previously outlined, such as the completion of a questionnaire for nurses and their awareness of the theme through in-service training; this provided me the development of a set of skills in the profile of Specialist Nurse in Child and Youth’s Health Nursing, proposed for this academic pathway.

Date of Award	27 Apr 2022
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Margarida Lourenço (Supervisor)