Abstract

Background: Type 1 diabetes is a chronic disease that worldwide greatly increases among children and adolescents. Major demands are required from the individual who has this disease, which also requires significant knowledge from the nurses so they can be able to develop and create individual conditions for children and adolescents. Thus, the children and the adolescents can be able to take responsibility and feel secure in their own care. The nurse's techniques and specific tools in this work are however not particularly noteworthy and therefore needs to be advised.

Aim: The aim of this study was to describe the experiences nurses have of supporting adolescents, between 12-18 years, with type 1 diabetes to an increased understanding of the disease and also to examine the methodological aspect data collection in the articles of this study. Method: A descriptive, literature study according to Polit and Beck (2012). 14 scientific articles have been produced from the databases PubMed and Cinahl, which can be accessed through the University of Gävle servers for scientific databases.

Main results: Nurses have experienced that it is important to include teamwork with the adolescents with type 1 diabetes. The importance of parents' continued commitments were also highlighted. It could be difficult to get feedback from the young people and therefore it was important that the nurse created trust and in an educational way could instruct young people to dare to take full responsibility over their own care. Many nurses also highlighted the importance of working with the best available scientific evidence in order to educate and disseminate facts about the disease.

Conclusion: Responsiveness, flexibility and support were key concepts in the nurse's work with children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. Nurses can not only work according to strictly established guidelines. Generally, nurses felt an uncertainty in the responsibility in the care of children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. This is established on the basis that nurses felt that they did not have sufficient knowledge to provide optimal care for children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes.