Ska jag verkligen göra det här? Sjuksköterskors upplevelser av att bedöma och anmäla oro för barn som misstänks fara illa : En intervjustudie

Sammanfattning: Background: Children at risk of abuse are a worldwide phenomena. They can be hard to identify, which puts high demands on healthcare-workers who meet them. Since 2001 swedish healthcare-personnel are obliged by law to report concerns of children at risk, although less reports are made than can be expected. Nurses working with children need to be aware of signs of children at risk to identify them, sothe children can receive adequate help. Purpouse: The purpouse of this study was to describe the experience of nurses when assessing and reporting concern for children at risk. Method: Qualitative inductive interviewstudy, 19 semi-structured interviews were carried out with nurses from two hospitals in southeast Sweden. Interviews were analyzed with content analysis. Results: Four categories were found answering the nurses’ experiences. There were What makes the nurse assess concern awarely, The workplaces’ effect on the nurse’s assessment, The nurses preconditions to make a concern assessment and The nurses feelings related to a concern assessment. Conclusions:The nurses’ experienced a lack of competence concerning assessing the need of reporting concern for children at risk. The lack of competence led to doubt whilst assessing, which made the support from colleagues and clear guidelines more important. The nurses’ experienced that they knew what to observe and which feelings to react to, but they didn’t have the courage or confidence concerning their assessment to follow through with a report of concern. The duration of the hospital stay was considered to affect the assessment. The lacking competence was mainly concerning a lack of experience and education in the matter, but the main difficulty was that the concern was subjective and varied from each person.