Resilience in children and their parents enduring paediatric medical traumatic stress

Summary

Due to the general lack of familiarity with the concept in the medical field, resilience is rarely considered in paediatric medical traumas. Resilience is an ability that enables recovery after adversities such as traumas, surgeries, serious health problems or social issues. Stress from medical traumas encompasses both the psychological and physical responses of children and their families. Lack of resilience in children with medical traumatic stress may contribute to poor adjustment, slow recovery, disruptive behaviours and psychiatric disorders. Furthermore, persistent parental distress increases the child's risk of low resilience. Consequently, these patients and their parents require early identification. This is achievable using a common stress measure such as the Perceived Stress Scale. Moreover, health care providers can screen patients' risks for low resilience, which include few social contacts, poor family functioning and low cohesion among family members. Findings from the stress scale and screened risks could indicate the need for additional psychosocial support at the time of diagnosis of a serious illness, soon after injuries, and before and after operations. Such interventions can include decreasing distress, counselling children and their parents and enabling strong connections to health care providers. Health care providers can help parents to minimise distress and adjust to their child's illness, thereby supporting the child's resilience, adjustment and recovery.

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