Abstract: Objective To investigate the status quo of enteral nutrition-related behaviors in pediatric ICU nurses, and to provide reference for the development of enteral nutrition management. Methods With convenient sampling, nurses from NICU, PICU, CCU and SICU were selected and surveyed by a self-designed questionnaire on enteral nutrition-related decision-making behavior of pediatric ICU nurses in January 2020. Results We obtained 142 out of 177 questionnaires and only 57.0% of the nurses were familiar with the nursing process of enteral nutrition in the department. In terms of measuring the length and verifying the position of gastric tube, 54.2%~94.4% of the nurses still adopted traditional method and 91.5% of the nurses assessed gastric residual volume before each feeding. When asked how to deal with gastric residual volume, 60.6% of the nurses discarded all of them. Our investigation also found that only 7.0% of the nurses always took the initiative to prevent or reduce the occurrence and development of feeding intolerance. Conclusion Generally, traditional approaches to enteral nutrition were adopted in pediatric ICU, and there are insufficient learning and exploration about new methods. More training of guidelines and new concepts, scientific enteral nutrition implementation procedures, standardized nursing behaviors, cultivation of nutrition specialist nurses, and good work atmosphere are beneficial to improving the initiative of nurses, thus to optimize the management of enteral nutrition in critically ill children.

Key words: pediatric, ICU, nurse, enteral nutrition, status survey