Yes / Children's hospices provide a range of services for babies, children and young people who have life-shortening conditions, including care after death in specialist 'cool bedrooms'. Caring for children after death is a challenging area of hospice care, with variation seen within, and between organisations. The study aims to identify current practices and to produce guidelines that promote safe practice in moving and handling and managing physiological deterioration of children after death. An electronic questionnaire was sent to all 54 British children's hospices; 33 responded (=62% of hospices). Variation in the way in which children's hospices delivered care after death was identified, in terms of the length of stay, care provision and equipment used, owing to demands of individual families and the experience and confidence of practitioners. Internal variation in practice can lead to practitioner anxiety, and risk-taking when providing care, particularly in the presence of family members. Practice recommendations have been made that reflect the practical demands of caring for a child's body after death; these have been split into two parts: moving and handling considerations and managing physiological deterioration. These recommendations should be used to support the development of policy and practice, allowing organisations to standardise staff expectations and to support practitioners when caring for children after death.

Collaborative care is a philosophy which guides the work of interdisciplinary teams and patients and their families internationally. It has been demonstrated to improve quality of care, safety, and patient and staff satisfaction, yet applying this philosophy still requires much investigation. This thesis describes processes of change directed towards a vision to enhance collaborative care relationships with patients and families within one hospital site of a non-acute academic health science centre in Ontario, Canada. By building focused conversations around existing patient and family centred education and using an initial conceptual framework of customer service, healthcare providers, mid- and senior level leaders shared their perspectives, negotiated meanings and created innovations to enhance collaborative relationships within the organization. Based within the critical paradigm, a critical collaborative ethnography was constructed with the use of sequential and mixed research methodologies. The ethnography evolved over three phases in a step-wise and additive design during the three year period of study. Phase 1 examined the perspectives of healthcare providers in an exploratory case study which contributed to mid-level leaders’ discussions in Phase 2. Cumulative findings from Phases 1 and 2 were brought to discussions with senior leaders in Phase 3. Members of a participative action research team assisted with research design and study processes. Shared meanings and innovative change ideas were developed and captured through the use of semi-structured focus groups and interviews, survey, participant observation and inductive analysis. A conceptual framework of ‘partners-in-care’ emerged and was used to assist participants to make sense of the values and factors important in their work with respect to collaborative relationships. The research processes facilitated the development of many innovations to enhance collaborative practice within the hospital. The organization was described by the research as undergoing directed change to enhance collaborative care as evidenced through participant self-reports, observed initiatives and the ethnographic descriptions. / Thesis (Ph.D, Rehabilitation Science) -- Queen's University, 2012-06-25 15:06:24.687

Nowadays the parental presence in the pediatric intensive care units (PICU) is quite common. Building a fellowship between parents and health care staff and high quality parents' integration into the care is a very demanding process. First of all, the success of this process largely depends upon the nurse. It is the very nurse who leads, educates, supports and also professionally integrates parents into their child's care. In addition, critically ill child's care in cooperation with parents is complicated by a high parental stress level, child's serious condition and high professional and technical requirements posed to the nurse. The graduation thesis concentrates on the parents' integration into the care of a critically ill child from the nurse's point of view. The goal of this thesis was to describe the general conditions of parents' integration into the critically ill child's care and to map the actual state of the cooperation within the nurse ? parent ? critically ill child relation from the nurse's point of view. Other goals included the analysis of nurse's feeling of readiness for work with parents of critically ill children, and elaboration of a booklet concerning the initial introduction of an intensive care and resuscitation unit for infants and older children for better parents' awareness. In the research part of the thesis a qualitative research was used. The data collection technique was a semi-standardized interview. A research sample was represented by seven nurses working in the sphere of the critically ill children care in four selected hospitals in the Czech Republic. The study took place in the period starting May 2011 till July 2011. The research results revealed that the parental integration conditions are not quite optimal. First of all, in this sphere the nurses pointed to a limited accommodation capacity for parents, lack of supporting services and unsatisfactory site layout of the intensive care units. The nurses expressed their readiness to the closer cooperation with critically ill children's parents in the basic nursing sphere, mostly, thereafter, in the sphere of hygiene care. The parental cooperation in the special-care sphere was accepted rather negatively by the respondents. As the research results show, most of the nurses consider the work with parents psychologically very demanding and during their school education they had never been prepared for it by anybody. Findings flowing from the research results gave birth to the information booklet that is a basic informational and educational material for parents of children admitted to the intensive and resuscitation care unit for older children and infants in Hradec Králové University Teaching Hospital. It also represents a detailed instruction for a similar material for other facilities of this type and, last but not least, it facilitates the whole process of initial parents' education for nurses. This graduation thesis can also assist in the education of children's nurses, help students and nurses working with critically ill children's parents understand the "Family-centered care" principles and their practical introduction.

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