Effectiveness of nursing interventions for management of children with bronchial asthma: A systematic review and meta-analysis

AimNursing interventions include the preventive care that can support and guide the nurse's effort to provide asthma interventions for children. Hence, this review was done to assess the effectiveness of nursing interventions for management of childhood asthma. MethodsWe conducted a search in Medline, the Cochrane library, EMBASE, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar from 1964 until April 2022. Meta-analysis was done using a random-effects model and pooled weighted mean difference (WMD) or standardized mean difference (SMD) and/or risk ratio (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). ResultsFourteen studies were analysed. The pooled RR was 0.49 for emergency visits (95% CI: 0.32 to 0.77) and 0.46 for hospitalizations (95% CI: 0.27 to 0.79). The pooled WMD was -1.20 for number of days with symptoms (95% CI: -3.50 to 1.11), -0.98 for number of nights with symptoms (95% CI: -2.94 to 0.98) and -0.69 for frequency of asthma attacks (95% CI: -1.19 to -0.20). The pooled SMD was 0.39 for quality of life (95% CI: 0.11 to 0.66) and 0.58 for asthma control (95% CI: -0.29 to 1.46). ConclusionNursing interventions were relatively effective in improving the quality of life and reducing asthma related emergencies, acute attacks and hospitalization amongst childhood asthma patients.