Nurses’ experiences of blood sample collection from children: a qualitative study from Swedish paediatric hospital care

BACKGROUND: Nurses play an active role in supporting the children with the blood sampling experience. Unfortunately, the blood sampling collection procedure is often affected by pre-analytical errors, leading to consequences such as delayed diagnosis as well as repeated sampling. Moreover, children state that needle procedures are the worst experience of their hospital stay. The nurses’ experiences of errors occurring during blood sample collection is unknown. Therefore, the aim of this study therefore was to describe paediatric nurses’ experiences of blood sampling collections from children. METHOD: We used a qualitative study design with a (reflexive) thematic analysis (TA) method described by Braun and Clarke. Three focus group interviews were conducted, with 19 nurses collected by purposeful sampling from Sweden working at two different paediatric hospitals, focusing on their experiences of the blood sample collection procedure. RESULTS: From the three focus group interviews we analysed patterns and meanings of the following main theme Paediatric blood sampling is a challenge for the nurses and the four subthemes Nurses’ feelings of frustration with unsuccessful samplings, Nurses believe in team work, Venous blood sampling was experienced as the best option, and Nurses’ thoughts and needs regarding skills development in paediatric blood sampling. CONCLUSION: The narrative results of this study illustrate that nurses working in paediatric hospital care face a big challenge in blood sampling collection from children. The nurses felt frustrated due to unsuccessful blood samplings and frequently could not understand why pre-analytical errors occurred. Nevertheless, they felt strengthened by colleagues in their team and shared feelings of responsibility to help each other with this complex procedure. The implications of this study are that paediatric hospital care needs to focus on improving guidelines for and increasing competence in blood sampling children and helping nurses to understand why samplings may be unsuccessful and how this can be avoided.