Hospital room or treatment room: Where should inpatient pediatric procedures be performed?

Current clinical practice and policy recommend that all inpatient medical procedures be performed in a treatment room and not in a child's hospital room. However, discussion of the rationale behind this recommendation, as well as supporting data, are lacking. A vignette-type survey was used to evaluate the influence of child age and invasiveness of procedure on nurse preferences regarding room choice. The survey also asked for information considered important to this issue. Nurses (N = 126) completed 1 of 6 surveys varying age of patient (3 years, 9 years, 14 years) and type of procedure (lumbar puncture, intravenous line placement). Room choices were significantly associated with procedure type and marginally associated with child age. Nurses were more likely to choose the treatment room for the lumbar puncture and the hospital room for the intravenous line placement. The treatment room was selected most frequently for both procedures on the 3-year-old child. A number of other factors were also identified as being important to this clinical issue. Results suggest that better guidelines need to be developed that take into account child-specific, procedural, and situational factors.