Evaluation of Hospitalization Anxiety in Children and its Relationship with Maternal Anxiety

Hospitalization is a threatening situation in children's lives. Depending on the degree of development, the child can receive anxiety and stress from parents, especially the mother. Identifying the extent of hospitalization anxiety and its relationship with maternal anxiety is a way to control the child's anxiety. Therefore, the present study aimed to determine the level of anxiety caused by hospitalization in children and its relationship with maternal anxiety.

This descriptive-correlational study was performed on 169 pediatrics aged 8-12 years admitted to Dr. Sheikh and Akbar pediatrics' Hospitals and the pediatric wards of Ghaem and Imam Reza Hospitals in Mashhad. The study instruments were the Demographic Information Questionnaire, the  Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children, the Spielberger Explicit and latent Anxiety Scale (for mothers), and the Wong and Bigger Pain Scale. The collected data were analyzed after entering the SPSS software ver.11.5 using descriptive statistics to investigate the relationship between variables by Pearson or Spearman correlation test.

The mean age of the children was 9.95±1.35, and 49.1% of them were firstborn. The mean score of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children by March was 45.14±15.21. There was a direct and significant relationship between the standardized mean score of children's state anxiety (P=0.001), trait anxiety of mothers (P=0.008), and child age (p=0.003). The multiple regression results indicated that state maternal anxiety and children's age could predict 35.5% of variance changes in children's anxiety. The highest predictive power was related to children's age (beta coefficient=3.675), and then to the state of maternal anxiety (beta coefficient= 0.504).

According to the results, children, especially older ones, needed physical and mental care to reduce anxiety. Furthermore, mothers also needed mental and psychological care because they were present at the child's bedside during hospitalization, and their anxiety and behavior affected the sick children and the treatment process.