The caregiver in the child/adolescent hospitalization context

Introduction: The full time permanence of a caregiver with hospitalized child and adolescents, as determined by the Brazilian Child and Adolescent Statute ("Estatuto de Crianca e do Adolescente" - ECA), in 1990, is an essential humanization issue, which leads to a change in the formal structure of hospital organization. Objective: Knowing the current research trends on caregivers in the children and adolescent hospitalization environment and identifying actions directed to them. Methodology: the search was held in September 2014 in the LILACS database of Health Virtual Library ("Biblioteca Virtual em Saude" - BVS), using the keyword search, with the keywords: "caregivers" or " patient's companions" or "parents" and "hospitalization" or "hospitalized child" or "hospitalized adolescent". Results/Discussion: We selected 11 papers; 71% of those were from Nursing; 81% were performed in the Southern Brazil; 10 were qualitative researches e 1 qualitative-quantitative; 8 studies revealed that most of the participants were the hospitalized child/adolescent's mother. The caregivers highlighted that in 82% of the papers, the participants brought up the importance of the connection established by the caregivers; in 73% of them, the caregivers highlighted the communication between caregivers and the health staff; 64% pointed out the rules and hospital routines and 45% mentioned the faith and religiousness aspect. Conclusions: It is believed that these results may contribute to improve the comprehension of the hospitalized children and adolescents caregivers needs. Thus, this work will be able to help creating a more humanized hospital assistance and to improve the quality of services provided.