THE IMPACT OF INFORMATIONS ABOUT PICU STAY PROVIDED BY NURSES ON ANXIETY OF PARENTS

OBJECTIVE: Congenital Heart Defects are very common in pediatric population but the parents of affected children are often informed about these malformations only after the birth of their baby. In this period, they understand the severity of the pathology but also discover that surgery is the only approch to treat it. For this reason parents are frightned and worried and their anxiety is often magnified by little detailed or too superficial informations: in most cases this occurs in young (Eldredge et al., 2006) or workers parents (Wang et al., 2010). The aim of the study is to evaluate if more detailed information about PICU stay given by nurses to parents is able to condition their anxiety before and after the surgery. METHODS: A supportive care trial study of 16 parents of baby who had to undergo cardiac surgery was carried out. Patients were randomized into 2 groups (8 vs 8), standardized for age, sex and level of education, depending on wheter they received by nurses detailed or superficial informations about PICU stay of their baby. Then, STAI-Y form 1 questionnaire was used to evaluate anxiety of the parents in the two groups. RESULTS: In the group that received detailed information the average score of STAI-Y form 1 was 45,25 (56,56%) while in the group made up of parents who had no additional information it was 50,75 (63,43%). CONCLUSION: Parents who didn't take advantage from the additional informations provided by nurses proved to have more anxiety than those belonging to the other group. These results seem to confirm those present in the literature: the equipments in ICU generate fear and dread (Re et al., 2013). We are confident that these preliminary results may be useful to the whole health community and that it is necessary to develop specific educational programs for the family of the baby hospitalized in PICU to recreate an optimal relationship between the child and family