The mothers' experiences in the pediatrics hemodialysis unit

The need for hemodialysis exerts a deep impact on the lives of children and adolescents with end-stage kidney chronic failure and their mothers, who predominantly assume the care related to treatment. The hemodialysis requires that the mother accompanies the child during sessions at least three times a week and, since it is not a healing practice, they also experience the waiting for a kidney transplant, attributing different meanings to this experience.

To understand what it means for the mothers to accompany the child in a Pediatric Hemodialysis Unit and to construct a theoretical model representing this experience.

The Symbolic Interactionism was adopted as a theoretical model and the Grounded Theory as a methodological framework. Data were collected through interviews with 11 mothers.

The comparative analysis of the data enabled the identification of two phenomena that compose the experience: "Seeing the child´s life being sucked by the hemodialysis machine" expresses the experiences of the mothers that generates new demands to comprehend the new health conditions of their children and "Giving new meaning to the dependence of the hemodialysis machine" that represents the strategies employed to endure the experience. The relationship of these phenomena allowed the identification of the main category: "Having the mother's life imprisoned by the hemodialysis machine", from which we propose a new theoretical model.

The results of the study allow us to provide a theoretical ground for planning an assistance that meets the real needs of the mothers, identifying aspects that require intervention.