Grantee Profiles
Nancy Ryan-Wenger
Do Children's Opinions Matter When It Comes to Quality?
INQRI Researcher Dr. Nancy Ryan-Wenger talks about the Quality of Pediatric Nursing Care from the Children's Perspective
Nancy Ryan-Wenger calls them the "silent consumers of care." There are more than 3 million children who are hospitalized each year, and more than half are old enough to report on their experiences. But their voices are never heard. That's because there is no way to solicit their opinions to measure the quality of care they've received.
INQRI researcher Ryan-Wenger and her interdisciplinary team at Nationwide Children's Hospital are working to change that by developing a patient satisfaction scale that specifically seeks the perspectives of hospitalized children. Through their research, the team, which includes a developmental psychologist, hopes to show that children's opinions about their care matters, that their opinions may affect their outcomes, and most importantly, that what matters to parents does not always matter to children.
Ryan-Wenger, who is director of nursing research, says her interest in this issue was spurred when she began working at Nationwide, a large children's hospital in Columbus Ohio. She took a look at the patient survey form they handed out after children were discharged and realized that nearly 80 percent of the questions focused on the parents. "They centered more on the parents comfort about the hospital stay but little about the children's care, and the children's opinions about their care were not sought at all," she says.
She says soliciting those views from children are critically important to showing the link between certain characteristics of direct nursing care and quality. "Their point of view would complete the picture of the whole care experience," she says. "I think we'll show that what parents think children think is not the same as what children think."
Ryan-Wenger and her team are conducting a cross-sectional descriptive study to obtain information about children's experiences with nurses and about the immediate physical, psychological, and social outcomes of their nursing care. They have already interviewed about 200 of the 420 children targeted and are analyzing the first cut of data. The team is interviewing children between the ages of 6 and 21 who are hospitalized and asking them questions such as "what is the best thing about your nurse," "did they meet your needs," "did they provide comfort," "how well did they communicate," "what is the worse thing about the care you received," and "what would you change about being in the hospital."
Ryan-Wenger says that the data collected through this effort will be instrumental for conducting a pilot version of a pediatric satisfaction survey to test at multiple sites. She is hoping that this effort, the only one of its kind in the country, will result in a survey specifically for children that can be used by children's hospitals and pediatric units nationally.
One of the benefits of this effort will be the ability to collect data related to anxiety and depression and quality of life levels among hospitalized children so they can use that information to help interpret children's responses to questions about quality of nursing care. They also will be able to examine how to provide the best care to different kinds of patients. "We expect that children who come in for repeated hospital visits because they have a chronic illness will have a very different set of expectations and perceptions about their care than someone who has never been to the hospital before," she says.
To learn more about this project, contact Dr. Ryan-Wenger at .