A Systematic Review of Nursing Theories in Pediatrics Settings

The only way to present nursing as a profession, in its own right, is to develop its theories. The pursuit of further clarity may enable pediatric nurses to plan for further studies and use appropriate theories in practice. This needs an inquiry to start with a review of existing literature from various research fields to clarify key knowledge and gaps. Therefore, this study aimed to review studies on nursing theories in pediatric settings.

The study design was a systematic review with a qualitative synthesis approach. The inclusion criteria were articles written in English published from 2000 to 2020, focusing on developing a new theory or using previous nursing theories in pediatric settings, in PubMed, Scopus, Ovid, and EBSCO databases. The exclusion criteria were the articles written in languages other than English, settings other than pediatric, and not finding the full text. The qualitative synthesis was used to integrate the data using MAXQDA10.

The results of data analysis showed 24 new theories were developed by the grounded theory approach regarding parenting, nurse-family interaction, and improving nursing care. Moreover, the theories of some nursing scholars, such as Orem and Watson, were mostly used as a framework in studies on cancer (18.96%) and critically-ill children, especially adolescents (21.81%).

This study clarified the trend of nursing theories in pediatric settings and highlighted the gaps in the literature, over the last two decades. The study provides implications for future studies regarding nursing theories in pediatric settings and, encourages nurses to strive in the journey of professionalization by utilizing and developing more nursing theories. Future studies can focus on other aspects, such as primary and tertiary prevention in different age groups or the most prevalent diseases in children.