On this month's cover, perianesthesia nurse Carolyn Benigno helps prepare a young patient for surgery at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC. The photo was selected as the first-place winner of AJN's 2015 Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work photo contest. Readers were encouraged to submit candid photos of nurses on the job, and we received numerous responses from nurses around the world.
The photo (captioned by Children's National as "Caring Through Play") exemplifies Benigno's definition of the art-as opposed to the science-of nursing. The art of working at a pediatric hospital, she says, is "learning how to play with children so that part of your nursing care is play."
Approximately 15,000 surgeries are performed at Children's National each year. Nurses like Benigno help their young patients pass the time with tablets, rides in toy cars, blowing bubbles, and stickers. While playing has the benefit of serving as a distraction, it can also help children cope with the disorienting experience of being in the hospital. Using fun, familiar items makes the environment less threatening: "They don't see face masks every day," Benigno says, "but they do see stickers."
For another example of nurses trying to make hospitalization less stressful for children, see this month's Cultivating Quality article, "Improving Pediatric Temperature Measurement in the ED."-Diane Szulecki, associate editor