1Professor, Head of the Department, Department of Child Health Nursing, Bishop Benziger College of Nursing, Kollam, Kerala
2Nursing Tutor, Department of Child Health Nursing, Bishop Benziger College of Nursing, Kollam, Kerala
3Clinical Instructor, Department of Child Health Nursing, Bishop Benziger College of Nursing, Kollam, Kerala
The birth of a child can represent a significant transition for most families and requires establishment of new family and routines. The birth of a child with a critical illness who is then cared in NICU, creates unanticipated crises, alters family patterns in ways that are stressful and makes coping demands for dealing with a critical child more pronounced for the family system. Research findings reveal that parents adopt varying coping strategies to overcome the stress related to child being admitted in NICU.
1) To assess the stress among the mothers of babies admitted in NICU. 2) To assess the coping strategies adopted by mothers of babies admitted in NICU. 3) To find the correlation between stress and coping strategies of mothers of babies admitted in NICU.
4) To find the association between stresses of mothers of babies admitted in NICU with selected demographic variables.
5) To find the association between coping strategies of mothers of babies admitted in NICU with selected demographic variables.
The study was conducted in 15 bedded NICU in Bishop Benziger Hospital. The sample includes 60 mothers of babies admitted in NICU during the period of the study. A Quantitative approach was used for the study. The research design was descriptive and correlational design. The sampling technique was purposive sampling. The stress and coping strategies among the mothers was assessed using modified and validated likert scales of stress and coping strategies. The data obtained was statistically analyzed.
Among the study samples, majority of the mother were between the age group of 21–25 years (53.3%), 48.3% have secondary education and 65% were housewives. Most of the samples have family income between Rs.5000-10000, 40% were Christians and majority of them have one or two children and 56.6% belongs to nuclear family. In the present study, 98.33% of mothers have severe stress and all samples have strong coping abilities. The mean stress score was 74.75 and that of coping strategies was 80.34. The co-efficient of correlation ‘r’ was found to be 0.1192, which means that there was only a weak positive correlation between stress and coping strategies. There was no association between selected demographic variables with stress or with coping strategies.
Stress, Coping strategies, NICU, mothers
