Communication is one of the main foundations for providing nursing care. Due to intercountry mobility, nurses encounter communication barriers with patients and their families, such as language and sociocultural differences.

This study was conducted to investigate the experiences of pediatric nurses in caring for refugee children. The phenomenological study was conducted between November 2023 and February 2024 with 16 pediatric nurses working in the inpatient wards of Istanbul Prof. Dr. Cemil Tascioglu City Hospital Pediatrics Clinic who agreed to participate in the study. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews and voice recordings. After the interviews were transcribed, the MAXQDA 2022 program was used for coding, creating themes, and analyzing the relationship between codes and sub-codes.

The nurses revealed themes of the care process, difficulties related to the patient, communication methods, risks in patient safety, feelings experienced about the ineffective communication, and suggestions. The main codes obtained from the themes were loss of time, difficulties in communication and training, difficulties arising from cultural practices, using body language, wrong practices regarding patient safety, sadness and fatigue experienced when there is no communication, and the need for learning Turkish.

The pediatric nurses had problems with communication and felt sadness about caring for refugee children. The problem of loss of time in giving care due to language and sociocultural differences, and the suggestion of learning Turkish as the solution come to the fore. It is necessary to carry out comprehensive research on this subject.