MONTREAL, Sept. 4 (UPI) -- Children who've been hospital intensive care unit patients can be traumatized by the experience even months after returning home, Canadian researchers say.
Dr. Janet Rennick at the Research Institute of The Montreal Children's Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre and her colleagues developed the Children's Critical Illness Impact Scale to measure psychological distress in children following hospital discharge.
The 23-item questionnaire provides a tool that will allow healthcare professionals to pick up on and recognize those children who need psychological support as a result of their hospital stay. It is based on the results of 64 interviews conducted with children who had been hospitalized in an intensive care unit, their parents and healthcare professionals.
The study was conducted across three Canadian pediatric hospitals.
"We know some children suffer post-traumatic stress symptoms after having spent time in the intensive care unit," Rennick says in a statement. "Parents and children have described delusional memories of their hospital experience which continue to bother the child after they go home."
The findings are published in the Journal of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.
