Abstract
This research has been carried out to determine the challenges experienced by nurses working in child clinics while providing care to Syrian refugee children. The research has been carried out in descriptive design. The data of the research has been collected through 125 nurses who work in child services of two different provinces in the east of Turkey, and had previously provided care for Syrian refugee children. In collecting the data, a personal information form including age, gender, education level, unit the nurse studies and the year of study in the profession, and a standard form which was composed of open-ended questionnaire questions regarding the difficulties and differences in providing care to Syrian children have been used. Descriptive statistics has been used in the analysis of quantitative data, and content analysis method has been used in the analysis of qualitative data. The data of the research has been collected by face to face interview technique. In the research, the average age of nurses is 28.04±5.26 and the average years of employment in the profession is 5.47±4.66. It has been determined that 55.2% of the nurses were female and 76.8% had received undergraduate education. As a result of the analysis of the qualitative data, themes and sub-themes have been determined. Three main themes determined in the research have been detected as; (1) communication difficulties, (2) problems regarding treatment and care practices, and (3) cultural differences. As the result of the research, it has been determined that the nurses experienced various difficulties while applying care to Syrian refugee children. In order to solve the experienced problems, it is recommended that nurses should take cultural differences into consideration while providing care to Syrian patients and institutional steps should be taken to eliminate communication difficulties.