Technological advances in pediatrics: challenges for parents and nurses

Ongoing technological advances in pediatrics are improving the survival rates among babies born with life-threatening anomalies. For these neonates, surgeries like brain shunts, trachea, gut and heart reconstruction, and organ transplants are replacing palliative care. Although parents and health care professionals alike are celebrating the successes, advancing technology also raises issues for everyone involved. This paper incorporates Dunst and Trivette's Effective Helpgiving framework and the Calgary Family Intervention Model to recommend nursing care that moves beyond life-saving highly technical surgical procedures and responds to the challenges parents face with their children with complex congenital heart disease, for example, who have "beat the odds."