ABSTRACT
Paediatric intensive care units (PICUs), provided in the UK by regional centres, improve survival (Ramnarayan et al., 2010). However, when children initially become critically ill they are often in their local hospital. Children are usually only admitted to ICUs if additional care to that available on paediatric wards is needed, and until retrieval teams from PICUs arrive to transport patients to specialist centres (DH, 1997; Hallworth and McIntyre, 2003). The occasional emergency paediatric admission creates two main problems for staff in general (adult) ICUs:
n when children are admitted, their condition is usually at its most critical/ unstable;
n admission is so infrequent, most staff in general ICUs have little or no experience of paediatric nursing.
