Nurse Interventions: A Means of Caring for Children with Tetralogy of Fallot after Surgical Repair

Caring is a concept that is coined from different perspectives and perceptions as related to the caregiver as well as the one to be cared for. Fallot’s Pathology is a condition that is prevalent in Cameroon in particular and Africa in general. In these countries, care is certainly effective but the fact remains that a modeled caring approach towards children suffering from this pathology is still lacking. The author went out to search for which nursing interventions were shown and demonstrated by the nurses of the surgical heart center following surgical repair of children with Tetralogy of Fallot. This was a descriptive quantitative study conducted from the frameworks of Watson and Swanson. About 303 undergraduate nurses took part in the study and answered the questionnaires, selected through a non-probability convenience sampling technique. Descriptive statistics were used to convert and reduce data. Data was displayed and interpreted to arrive at intelligible impressions that could be further explored through descriptive and inferential statistics, after which information was processed statistically and explored for correlations or dissociations between the variables. This was done using SPSS software version 21.0 to analyse information gotten from the questionnaires. Furthermore, multiple corresponding analysis was used to present the results of the different caring behaviors for the questions with the Likert scale for nurse interventions slotted as items indicating “doing for” The results of this study, for each item of “doing for”, the dominant modalities included agree with a percentage range of 51% to 66% and “tend to agree” with the percentage range of 31% to 39%. The results attested that caring is an action and an intervention, where direct care is delivered to the child either through an autonomous or collaborative approach. Concerning “doing for”, the nurses attested that caring is an action and an intervention, where direct care is delivered to the child either via an autonomous or a collaborative approach. The results revealed three areas as towards point of laboratory care, as nurses embarked on monitoring blood gases, care towards techno-healing environment, as nurses tailored their observations towards the heart monitor.