Psychological effects of hospitalisation in children

Recent research shows that a stay in the hospital can traumatize a child for several months. This study was carried out at The Montreal Children's Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre, Canada. They studied 120 children who had been hospitalised in either the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) or the regular medical-surgical wards. The average age of the children in the study was 11 years and they were observed for 6 months after discharge from the hospital. The researchers compared the psychological responses of children hospitalised in a PICU with those of children hospitalised in a general ward in order to identify relevant factors that might be associated with psychological effects. The researchers expected to find that the PICU patients would be more traumatized and likely to have lingering psychological problems than those in the wards because children in the PICU tend to be more severely ill and undergo more invasive procedures. In addition, previous research had shown that children in PICUs are more apprehensive, anxious, detached and sad than other hospitalised children. Six months after hospitalisation, the younger children and those who underwent a large number of invasive procedures had persistent psychological problems like nightmares and fear of medical care. It made no difference whether the child was in the PICU or the general ward. This might be due to the fact that children in the PICU were more likely than those treated in the general wards to receive sedation and pain-killing medications. Children on the wards too had quite a large number of invasive procedures done on them and were fairly sick. But they received much less sedation than those in PICU. The researchers also found that parents could make a big difference. Children who were comforted had fewer lingering psychological problems if parents stayed by their sides during frightening procedures irrespective of whether the child was completely awake and alert or not. These findings indicate that regardless of the hospital setting, invasiveness coupled with length of stay and severity of illness in young children may have adverse long-term effects.