Nurses’ engagement with acutely ill infants hospitalized in an emergency and with attending family members

<p> Objective: In this study Ⅰ aimed at clarifying specifically how nurses obtain and interpret information, about infants in an acute stage who had been admitted to a hospital in an emergency, from the infant and their accompanying families before engaging with them based on the information. Methods: Leininger’s ethnonursing research method was employed. The key informants were six nurses. The general informants were seven acutely ill infants who had been hospitalized for an emergency, eight family members who attended them, and one physician. Results: Four themes were derived that would be the basis for the major theme: Nurses created space for the child and the attending family members and prepared the hospital room so the environment was as close to home as possible in order to understand the child’s normal demeanor, i.e. symptoms other than their reactions to change of environment due to hospitalization, without exacerbating their condition. Discussion: The nurses created space for parent and child in the hospital room and focused on detecting early signs of abnormalities by observing the natural facial expressions and movements of the child toward the family members. In addition, to prevent the infant’s symptoms from worsening, the nurses made efforts to make the space closer to home, with the attending family members taking the initiative, starting from the acute stage when the infant was hospitalized.</p>