Nursing care in pediatric tracheostomized patients: a knowledge challenge for these professionals. Literature review

Introduction: One of the most applied surgical interventions in the critical care area is tracheostomy, which involves the incision and opening of the trachea to insert a plastic cannula between the 2nd and 3rd cartilage ring. This cannula is strategically placed to constantly maintain a free airway. Objective: to conduct a review of the literature on nursing knowledge and care in pediatric tracheostomized patients. Methods: a bibliographic review was carried out according to the guidelines proposed by the PRISMA declaration. The articles were extracted from three renowned databases in the scientific field: Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. “Tracheotomy”, “nursing care”, “postoperative complications” as well as their combinations were used as descriptors in English through the use of the Boolean operators “AND” and “OR”. The terms were chosen as long as they were included in the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) website. Before analyzing the documents in detail, inclusion and exclusion criteria were established, facilitating the focus on the most relevant works and discarding those that did not align with the research objectives and questions. Results: in the finally selected articles, the close relationship that exists between the level of preparation of nursing staff and their performance in caring for pediatric tracheostomized patients can be seen. Conclusions: the degree of knowledge of the nursing professional about the care of pediatric patients with tracheostomy directly influences the quality of health care that they are able to provide to the patient