Family-Centered Care Practices in Pediatric Intensive Settings
Summary
Family-centred care in paediatric intensive environments emphasises partnership between clinical teams and families to enhance safety, communication and emotional support. Core practices include bedside family-centred rounds in which professionals share clinical reasoning in lay language, invite parental input on treatment goals and collaborate on decision-making. Structured tools and checklists guide interdisciplinary teams to address clinical elements systematically while ensuring that families understand care plans. Recent innovations have extended these practices into virtual formats to maintain engagement under restrictive conditions. Implementation relies on organisational commitment, training of all disciplines and flexible scheduling to accommodate family availability. Globally, these approaches have been associated with improved family satisfaction, reduced errors in transition of care and heightened trainee confidence. Remaining challenges centre on nurse engagement, resources for non-English-speaking families and sustaining adherence beyond initial implementation phases.
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Family-Centered Care Practices in Pediatric Intensive Settings publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in family-centered care practices in pediatric intensive settings across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Family-Centred Rounds: A structured, bedside interdisciplinary meeting including family members to review the patient’s status and jointly set care goals.
Shared Decision-Making: A collaborative process in which families and clinicians exchange information and agree on healthcare decisions.
Virtual Family-Centred Rounds: An adaptation of bedside rounds using telecommunication technology to include remote family participation.
Implementation Determinants: Organisational, individual and contextual factors that influence the adoption and sustainability of clinical practices.
References
- The added value of family-centered rounds in the hospital setting: A systematic review of systematic reviews. PLOS ONE (2023).
- Virtual family-centered rounds: a quality improvement initiative to adapt inpatient care during COVID-19 using a human-centred participatory design approach. BMC Pediatrics (2023).
- Intervention, individual, and contextual determinants to high adherence to structured family-centered rounds: a national multi-site mixed methods study. Implementation Science Communications (2022).
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