Family-Centered Care From the Perspective of Parents of Children Cared for in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit: An Integrative Review

Abstract

Problem: The Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care's (IPFCC) definition of family-centered care (FCC) includes the following four core concepts: respect and dignity, information sharing, participation, and collaboration. To date, research has focused on the provider experience of FCC in the PICU; little is known about how parents of children hospitalized in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) experience FCC.

Eligibility criteria: Articles were included if they were published between 2006 and 2016, included qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods results, related to care received in a PICU, and included results that were from a parent perspective.

Sample: 49 articles from 44 studies were included in this review; 32 used qualitative/mixed methods and 17 used quantitative designs.

Results: The concepts of respect and dignity, information sharing, and participation were well represented in the literature, as parents reported having both met and unmet needs in relation to FCC. While not explicitly defined in the IPFCC core concepts, parents frequently reported on the environment of care and its impact on their FCC experience.

Conclusions: As evidenced by this synthesis, parents of critically ill children report both positive and negative FCC experiences relating to the core concepts outlined by the IPFCC.

Implications: There is a need for better understanding of how parents perceive their involvement in the care of their critically ill child, additionally; the IPFCC core concepts should be refined to explicitly include the importance of the environment of care.

Keywords: Family-Centered Care; Institute for Patient and Family Centered Care; PICU; Parent.

Figure 1

PRISMA flow chart of search process

Figure 2

Conceptualization of FCC in the PICU as a result of this integrative review. The evidence suggests that participation, respect and dignity, and information sharing are all impacted by environment. No evidence of collaboration was found in the included articles and as such this concept is not included in our post-review conceptualization.