The child as visitor on adult wards

Abstract

While the international trend is towards extended visiting for children on adult wards, at the main acute hospital in Malta, children are allowed to visit their close relatives on adult wards on Sundays and Public Holidays only for just 1 hour. This research proposal, which is of a descriptive, non-experimental design, has been carried out to identify the attitudes of nurses and patients towards the visiting of children on general adult wards. The literature review highlights that the visiting of children on adult wards is beneficial and that severe restricted visiting may be detrimental to both the parent and the child. A sample of 30 patients would be interviewed while a questionnaire would be distributed to 36 nurses. A pilot study was carried out to test the tools and some modifications were needed. It is planned to analyse the data collected by means of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Although one can identify several limitations in this proposed research study, the data collected would throw light on the research problem. The anticipated value and implications of the study are discussed.