Nursing skills during telephone consultations provided to parents caring for sick children at home

Abstract

 This study sought to identify categories of the nursing skills that nurses used when they provided telephone consultations about children’s health through the #8000 telephone number. We conducted semi-structured interviews with four nurses who had more than ten years of pediatric nursing experience and more than four years of practical experience providing telephone consultations. We analyzed the interview data using a qualitative descriptive analysis, and we identified eight broad categories of nursing skills used during telephone consultations: becoming familiar with the child’s living situation at home, visualizing the parents’ perceptions, complimenting the parent on their difficult work of having a job and raising a child/children at the same time, identifying issues/problems that the child was concerned about, modifying recommendations to make them more feasible, focusing on communicating effectively with the parent, providing a sense of security for the parent to calm their feelings, and supporting the parent and encouraging them to seek medical care for her child. The combination of these eight nursing skills during telephone consultations enabled nurses empathize with parents’ feelings and identify parents’ strengths to support their children’s health. This analysis demonstrated that phone consultations are a practical way for nurses to help develop parents’ abilities to care for their sick children at home.