The Negative Effects Of Hospitalization

As a Child and Family Development major, it was easy for me to decide what I wanted my essay to focus on, and that was children. The emphasis of my major is on Child Life. A child life specialist is a health care professional that works with children and their families to help them cope with long term hospitalization and illness. Therefore, this brought me to the topic of the negative effects of hospitalization on children. With this topic likely to be a part of my everyday life in the future, I was more than excited to research, and explore articles in this domain. The three disciplines that I looked into with my topic were psychology, sociology, and medicine. Psychology fit in well with my topic, and how hospitalization effects the psychological …show more content…
When deciding where to start, I chose to begin with the discipline of psychology. I began by searching “Children--hospitalization Psychological aspects”. These terms gave me a wide range of articles to choose from. I was really intrigued when I came across an article titled “Children and Illness: Psychological aspects of hospitalization” by T. Bastin. This article was about effects that hospitalization can have on a child’s relationships, and body image, and how this may have an effect on the disease, as well as the care. Unfortunately, when I went to read the entire article, the library informed me that it was unavailable. The next document I found on central search was a book called The Effects of Hospitalization on Children: Models for their Care, written by Evelyn Oremland and Jerome Oremland. Since I was at the library when doing my research, I was able to go find this book, and when I did, I came across another other book called Changing hospital environments for children by Lindheim, Glaser, and Coffin. As well as the book Emotional care of hospitalized Children by Madeline Petrillo and Sirgay Sanger. …show more content…
To get started I searched the terms “Children, Hospitalization effects, medicine” When searching this discipline, I only found two articles that truly interested me. One was called “Behavioral Effects of Hospitalization on Children” by M.C. Wright who discusses how most children’s behavior will change before, during,or after hospitalization, and the steps you can take to decrease the negative effects. The second medical article that I found interesting was called “Effects of hospitalization on Nutritional Status of Children” by Geila Rocha, Edmundo Rocha, and Ceci Martins. In this article the authors discuss the change in nutritional status from when the child is admitted into the hospital to when they are