Pediatric intensive care units have significantly reduced childhood morbidity and mortality, and have generated a group of children with special care needs. The common sense family care they receive at home however has not been trained to attend to them, interfering in their quality of life and causing frequent returns to hospital. To know about discharge from intensive care is to go beyond survival and to also offer a better quality of life. To this end we developed an epidemiological method in two public health care facilities in Rio de Janeiro, to investigate the time and number of hospitalizations and type and quantity of diagnosis between 1994-1999, with children aged from 29 days to 12 years. The results show that 6.3% (85) of 1355 hospitalized children were considered with special care needs, with 9 hospitalizations of up to 60 days. To each hospitalization can be added one or two basic diagnoses revealing chronic conditions.
nursing; child health; intensive care
