Intervention of the Rehabilitation Nurse in the promotion of functionality in children with impaired mobility
During childhood, children acquire a set of motor skills, which allows them to explore the environment and develop organizational schemes. Globally, many children have mobility disorders, the most frequent being congenital or acquired ones. Alterations in the mobility of these children can lead to restrictions in the participation and limitations in activities common for their age (Direção-Geral da Saúde, 2004). The intervention of the Rehabilitation Nurse is necessary to guarantee the satisfaction of the needs of these children.
The objective of this study is to systematize the interventions of the rehabilitation nurse in the promotion of the functionality of the children with alterations in their mobility, either of a congenital or neurological cause, being carried out an integrative review of the literature. To answer the aim of the study, the following investigation question was drafted: “In what way does the Rehabilitation Nurse promotes functionality in the child with alterations in their mobility due to congenital or neurological sources?” The research was carried out in CINAHL Complete, MEDLINE Complete, Nursing &Allied Health Collection, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews databases, through the platform EBSCOhost Research Databases and in Google.
Different search keywords were used, performing the corresponding associations with the Boolean operators “or” and “and”. The research had the following orientation: [(congenital OR Spina bífida OR cerebral palsy OR neurological OR brain injury OR stroke) AND child AND function* AND nurs* AND rehabilitation AND intervention].
To narrow down the articles it was defined as inclusive criteria articles written in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French; published between 2008-2018; articles that mentioned interventions which the aim was the promotion of the child’s functionality with congenital or neurological alterations. Articles with unclear methodology, without correlation with the aim of the study, repeted in the different databases and that were not available in its integral text were ruled out. The research was carried out between May and June of 2018.
In the end, five articles were selected, tree of which were primary studies and two were secondary studies, and from the analyses of these it is concluded that the interventions of the Rehabilitation Nurse emphasize motor rehabilitation, in particular, the training of walking (Paleg & Livingstone, 2015) and life activities (Akbari, Zadeh, Shahraki & Javaran, 2009), as well as health education for the parents (Chiarello, et al., 2010), are fundamental for the promotion of the functionality of these children. These interventions contributed as well for social, family and school inclusivity.
This study presented as a limitation the lack of investigation studies in the framework of the intervention of the rehabilitation nurse in the context of rehabilitation and promotion of the functionality in children with mobility alterations.