IMPLEMENTING FAMILY-CENTRED CARE: AN EXPLORATION OF THE BELIEFS AND PRACTICES OF PAEDIATRIC NURSES

Objective: This study explored paediatric nurses' perceptions of how they include and involve parents in the care of hospitalised children. Design: This qualitative study used individual unstructured interviews to gather data, the data was analysed using thematic coding. Setting: Paediatric wards within two regional area health services of New South Wales, Australia. Subjects: Fourteen paediatric nurses were asked to describe their beliefs and practices regarding the clinical application of family-centred care. Main outcome measure: Paediatric nurses' beliefs and practices about family-centred care were explored in an effort to explain how the concept was implemented. Results: The findings are presented as four interconnected themes. The first describes how participants either allocated tasks to parents or retained them, the second relates to the nurses' professional identity, the third theme identifies barriers and constraints to the implementation of family-centred care, while the fourth describes the nurses' beliefs about their responsibilities when delivering family-centred care. Conclusions: Together these findings suggest that while nurses endorse the concept of family-centred care, the implementation into practice is more problematic. While it is not possible to generalise these findings to other paediatric nurses, the authors believe the insight gained will resonate with paediatric nurses internationally. The findings from this study are being used as the basis for the development of clinical practice guidelines to assist paediatric nurses to more consistently apply the concepts of family-centred care to their practice.