Conference
CONNECTions 
The Official Journal of The 
28th Annual Meeting of the Society of Neonatology and Paediatric Intensive Care of the German speaking countries (GNPI)
Last June, the GNPI members of the three German-speaking countries, Austria, Switzerland and, of course, Germany, came together to hold their annual conference. For the third time since 1970 and 1975, the hosting place for this meeting was the 2,000-year-old city of Mainz, located in the south west of Germany. It was also in 1970 that the GNPI was founded in Mainz.
Due to this central location, and certainly due to the format and content of the conference programme, more than 1,500 medical and nursing delegates were attracted to attend this meeting.
A range of top national, European and international nursing and medical speakers was invited to exchange knowledge on current issues in paediatric and neonatal intensive care at a high level, and to define the current state of the art in these disciplines. Free papers, posters, seminars, workshops and several satellite symposia completed the programme.
The main topics of the nursing programme were:
- Professionalism in the Nursing Profession
- Life Activity ‘Breathing’
- Pain as a Nursing Challenge
- The Comatose Patient.
The first day of the nursing programme started with an opening ceremony, dedicated to the beginning of paediatric intensive care in Europe. It was in 1965 that the first paediatric intensive care unit in Germany was opened in Mainz, as the second in Europe after Gothenburg, Sweden. This was the reason to offer a historical review, a time journey through paediatric and neonatal intensive care from 1965 to 2002. It was interesting to see the first monitoring of vital signs with a room-filling technical device called the ‘Iron Nurse’ (Fig. 1).
Professionalism in Nursing
Professor Sabine Bartholomeyczik gave her professional talk about the chances and risks in care standards. In principle, standards in nursing care are used to inform care interventions in order to improve their quality. In her opinion, standards should find their base in evidence-based knowledge or on scientific research results, but should leave room for nursing creativity and competent decisions in individual cases. A positive result of the discussion on that topic was that a group of nurses showed an interest to work on standards for paediatric and neonatal intensive care nursing at a national level.
Another lecturer presented the model of reflective practice in the intensive care setting as a method of professional development. Reflective practice encourages nurses to analyse events, acknowledge feelings and their sources, learn from the experience and broaden their repertoire of responses and strategies for the future.
Other lectures demanded more ‘nursing involvement in clinical decisions’ and stated that nurses need a ‘self care competence’.
With a lot of practical advice, one speaker showed how to manage the fears of public speaking, especially while giving a lecture.
Life Activity ‘Breathing’
The second part of the nursing programme ‘Life activity breathing’ contained lectures about indications, nursing care and technical options of nasal CPAP in neonatology. Also, non-invasive ventilation with a mask is increasingly common practice in paediatric intensive care and helps to reduce the invasiveness of intensive care treatment. Several workshops about this topic were offered to improve the technical and practical skills of the participants. However, for a special population of critically ill children, high frequency oscillation ventilation is still mandatory. One speaker outlined the special nursing care after a standard care plan of these very sick patients.
‘Pain’ as a Nursing Challenge
The second day started with a topic that was most interesting for the attending
nurses. Although the session started early at 8.30am, the conference hall
was almost filled at that time. There was information about ‘stress
signals of premature infants’, given by a lecturer whose main focus
of interest is set on the neonatal individualised developmental care assessment
programme, called NIDCAP. A colleague from Zürich, Switzerland, introduced
their hospital-wide programme of pain management in children. Another Swiss
colleague from Bern talked about the validation results of the ‘Bern
Pain Score for Neonates’. A colleague from Hamburg presented the results
of his study about how care-givers measure pain in neonates. He found that
nurses in Germany have a sound theoretical background about pain and pain
indicators, and that pain measurement is a nursing task. On the other hand,
a systematic measurement of pain with scores and scales in PICUs and NICUs
is very rare these days. Therefore, a workshop where the wide range of pain
scales was presented was very well attended.
Sucrose can be used as an analgetic agent for premature babies and neonates.
A speaker from Mainz gave information about the working mechanism of sucrose,
the application, and for which indications sucrose is useful as a fast-acting
analgeticum.
The comatose patient
Early rehabilitation of patients with head injuries has become more common in Germany in the last few years. Early rehabilitation already begins at the PICU during the intensive care treatment and the team of care-givers includes specialists in physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy and basal stimulation, not forgetting the parents of the patient. All of them work in close co-operation. The children’s hospital Park Schönfeld in Kassel is a centre for early rehabilitation in Germany and a colleague from there presented their concept to the auditorium. Representatives from the disciplines mentioned above explained their involvement in this process. The speech therapists set their major focus on the treatment of speech and eating disorders as well as on the balance of tension. The physiotherapists implement neurophysiological treatments according to Bobath and Vojta. The occupational therapist stimulates the development of dialogue by activating tactile, acoustic and kinaesthetic perception. Parents and family members provide an environment of security for the children.
Free papers ranged from skin care of prematures, liver transplantation and cardiac surgery topics.
The meeting was supported by an excellent and interesting industrial exhibition
of medical, technical and pharmaceutical companies.
During the two days of the nursing programme, there was a very positive
and stimulating atmosphere among the delegates. Discussions during the sessions
were vital and easy to generate. New contacts were established and the comments
of most of the participants were very favourable about the interesting programme.
In one sentence: this meeting was a success!
Irene Harth, RN
University Children’s Hospital Mainz Logo Kinderklinik
iharth@t-online.de
