Implications for practice and research

• Post-traumatic stress symptoms are experienced by parents after a child's hospitalisation, even where the child's medical condition is not life-threatening.

• Screening parents during admission for risk factors, such as anxiety and single parent status, may facilitate more appropriate targeting of support.

Context

There is growing appreciation of the extent to which paediatric patients and their parents, are affected psychologically by their experiences in hospital.1 In particular, in the last decade, there have …