Barriers of Delivering Nursing Care to Pediatric Patients at Intensive Care Units

Background: As components of any working system, barriers have an impact on output and are closely related to the immediate work environment. The barriers significantly affect the way ICU patients are cared for. As there is little information available about the barriers ICU nurses face when caring for pediatric patients, it is imperative to conduct research to learn more about these challenges from the nurses' own experiences. The Iraqi Ministry of Health's guidelines and recommendations place a strong emphasis on conducting research studies to measure the challenges and barriers faced by healthcare providers.

Aims of the study: To determine barriers that might face delivering the nursing care for pediatric patient at intensive care. To find out association between barriers with nurses’ demographic characteristics (including: age / sex / education level / and years of experiences).

Method: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted from January 3rd, 2024, to February 20th, 2024. A non-probability (purposive) sampling approach was applied to select the research sample. The minimum sample size was 65 nurses, and by subtracting five participants for conducting pilot study, the final sample size was 60 nurses. Data collection conducted by used of A previously prepared questionnaire by Khurshid et al. (2023) was utilized after obtaining official permission from the authors.

Results: showed that when providing care for pediatric patients, ICU nurses encountered a number of barriers.

Conclusion: Lack of proper resources and devices, nursing shortage, lack of genuine management, and unclear work protocol were some of the obstacles pediatric nurses faced when providing care to pediatric patients.

Recommendation: To ensure higher-quality healthcare services, efforts should be directed at removing each of the aforementioned obstacles.