Inpatient Pediatric Oncology Nursing Adolescent Relational Care: It is Different, the Difference, and Making a Difference
Abstract
Adolescents diagnosed with cancer confront a unique set of psychosocial challenges related to their particular developmental stage. Adolescents have high rates of psychosocial distress at diagnosis and their distress rates remain high well into survivorship. A nurse’s knowledge and sensitivity to the unique intersection between adolescent development and having cancer is foundational to effective psychosocial care. Responsive relationships between adolescents and nurses may well ease the distress of being hospitalized for cancer treatment and mitigate the various unique psychosocial sequela that cancer has on the adolescent developing self. Very little research has been done to understand the experience and meaning of the relationships developed between inpatient pediatric oncology nurses and their adolescent cancer patients.
My purpose in this philosophical hermeneutic inquiry was to better understand the experience of relationship between adolescents with cancer and pediatric oncology nurses on pediatric oncology inpatient units, from both nurse and patient perspectives. Eight participants who have or had cancer during adolescence (14-18 years of age) and four pediatric oncology nurses were interviewed with an intent to expand the meaning of this relationship as it applies to practice. These data were then analyzed according to hermeneutic tradition as guided by the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Findings from this research revealed that adolescent needs are distinctive and important just because of their difference. Friendship-like adolescent-pediatric oncology nurse relationships on inpatient units are pivotal to a positive and developmentally constructive hospital experience. Developmentally appropriate relational nursing care includes: humor, social connection, “real speak,” being “rounded up” or treated older than chronological age, and friendship. The findings support the idea that friend-like relationships developed between nurses and adolescents are developmentally beneficial to the developing self and facilitate the integration of an adolescents pre-and-post cancer identity.
Developmentally appropriate relational care of adolescents hospitalized for cancer on pediatric oncology units, I conclude, should be thought of as a psychosocial intervention in and of itself. Nurse-adolescent relationships are key to positive adolescent development in pediatric oncology inpatient care. The findings of this study underscore the need for future research that further understands the ways in which the inpatient pediatric oncology nurse-adolescent relationship may be therapeutic and the ways in which it is not.
Description
Keywords
Nursing
Citation
Toner, N. (2017). Inpatient Pediatric Oncology Nursing Adolescent Relational Care: It is Different, the Difference, and Making a Difference (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26543