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A Day in the Life of a Pediatric Nurse



Visiting a pediatric clinic, you meet happy and welcoming faces that keep you feeling all is well, creating confidence and patience, settling your mind. How do they afford to keep you satisfied and optimistic? Yet, unlike other clinical practitioners, pediatric nurses deal with a range of medical conditions in children. 

On a normal day, a nurse wakes up to save lives.  Despite daily challenges, a nurse gets to work early. Radiology and report reviewing are usually completed first thing in the morning, before proceeding to plan out the rest of the day. The day plan includes arranging all charts before a nurse starts seeing patients. Before attending to any out-patient, the nurse makes multidisciplinary bedside rounds to all patients recording the patient's health.

Related: What To Do When Family Doesn’t Understand Your Hectic Schedule


The routine day plan includes at the least, nursing procedures for all patients, receival of new patients, recording respective details about each patient, and providing special care to critical patients. The nursing procedures include bathing each individual patient, nursing wounds and burns, and assisting patients in taking drugs. Unlike other nurses, pediatric nurses are trained for all nursing procedures to make the most accurate decisions in a given situation.

During bedside rounds, nurses are needed to provide conclusive medical histories of each patient, record various doctor’s requests, and provide radiology and related documents among others. After morning rounds, pediatric nurses with a respective specialist, take patients to other departments for lab tests or imaging, as scheduled by their doctors. Each nurse is also tasked to keenly observe their patients and respond to rising issues, as such cases are frequent in pediatric wards.

For various reasons a reasonable number of pediatric in-patients are critical conditions cases, seldom uncritical child-patients are unaccompanied by their guardians. A pediatric nurse working in a high dependency unit assists in fixing life-saving machines, pumping heart actions such as resuscitating, feeding babies or helping patients and their relatives reduce anxiety. Here the nurse must monitor the progress of their patients, and they are  expected to have an understanding of the patient’s history, and work with the patient’s specialists such as a respiratory therapist.

Working in such rigorous conditions requires nurses to work harmoniously, as a team. Advice has to be collected from clinical departments to make operations attainable. For instance, a nurse will always seek a pharmacist’s advice when a new drug is provided, a nutritionist when the condition of the baby changes etc.

Related: Family Nurse Practitioners 

Nurses in reception and consultation halls wake up to prepare charts. As soon as they report at their working sections, new out-patients start pouring into various waiting areas. Most Nurses are engaged in consultation while others are filling this chart while referring that patient to which lab, and another to what imaging section. Compiling of patient reports and scheduling  the next visit, along with other documentations are handled here. These nurses work to serve all patients with agency, despite the uncertainty in the number of cases reported, complexity of each case, and other challenges.

This is not easy work, each nurse’s day is a tremendously intensive, coupled with precision and care. They keep our children calm during medical procedures, giving injections to children as young as a few days old requires a combination of courage and heart. These are the kinds of traits common among pediatric nurses, and are exemplified by their responsibilities on the job.

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