Authors: Anu Savio Thelly and Dr Tara Devi Laabar.
As the International Nurses Day approaches, we asked a simple question to the nurses with the “Introductory Course in Pediatric Palliative Care Nursing”, an initiative by Sunflower Children’s Network, Two Worlds Cancer Collaboration (TWCC), in partnership with the International Children’s Palliative Care Network (ICPCN) and the Global Palliative Nursing Network (GPNN).
“What does being a nurse for children needing palliative care mean to you?”
What the responses from refugee settlements, hospitals and neonatal units, home-care programs, and communities worldwide reveal is not what most people imagine when they picture nursing. They are the advocates, witnesses, communicators, comforters, coordinators, and companions, walking with families through uncertainty, grief, hope, and love.
Presence Before Protocol
Many nurses shared, first and most simply, about presence.
|
Others reflected on the long arc of that companionship — stretching from diagnosis through death, and beyond.
|
Across every reflection, one truth surfaced again and again: when cure is no longer possible, the role of nurses does not end. In many ways, it only deepens.
|
Some nurses frame this even more expansively. Children are not only individuals in a bed. They are, as one nurse put it, something the whole world has a stake in:
|
Every nurse who reflected on their practice eventually returned to the same commitment: seeing the whole child.
|
Beyond symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments, they spoke about recognising the child’s fears, hopes, family, and dignity
|
Perhaps no reflection captures this more tenderly than this:
|
Nurses described their work as the daily practice of preserving dignity while relieving suffering — a commitment that goes far beyond the bedside.
|
Reflecting on what it means to see the child behind the diagnosis — to hold the full weight of who a child is, not only what they are facing.
|
Whether in intensive care units, refugee settings, hospices, or family homes, nurses spoke of walking beside children and families with compassion across cultures, disciplines, and enormous distances, yet returning always to the same quiet commitment: to truly see the whole child.
|
Others described the quiet moments that never appear in textbooks or policy discussions but that define nursing practice every single day.
|
In low-resource and humanitarian settings, where systems are stretched and support is scarce, the role of nurses is irreplaceable.
|
Nurse Munni Khatun with a young patientin the children’s ward in the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh (Photo: Fabeha Monir/Two Worlds Cancer Collaboration)
These reflections also quietly challenge how the world has come to understand nursing itself. Children’s palliative care nurses do not simply provide care. They are often the ones holding together its entire emotional, relational, and practical fabric.
They assess pain before anyone else notices it. They sit with parents in the hours after devastating news. They teach families how to care for their child at home. They advocate fiercely for children who cannot speak for themselves. And they stay — long after the cure is no longer on the table.
And yet, globally, children’s palliative care nursing remains under-recognized, under-supported, and under-represented in the leadership and policy spaces that shape healthcare.
This is a call to invest in nurses working in the most underserved settings, as we should anywhere else. A call to acknowledge the emotional and moral labour nurses carry — often silently, often alone. A call to ensure that no child suffers because compassionate, skilled care is simply unavailable.
One reflection, perhaps, says it best:
|
The question is not whether children will face serious illness. They will. The question is, when they do, whether a nurse will be present, trained, supported, and present enough to make sure they do not face it alone.
These nurses have chosen to show up and stay. The systems that surround them must choose to show up and stay, too.
These reflections were gathered from nurses in our global children’s palliative care learning community ahead of International Nurses Day. We are grateful to every nurse who shared their voice.
