Efficient or family-centred? Practitioners' goals in decisions regarding parental presence during invasive procedures

Little is currently documented about how health care professionals determine when parental presence is appropriate during an invasive procedure. The research profiled in this article was a qualitative study of the decision-making by 10 nurses and five physicians in PICU regarding when and how to include parents as witnesses to invasive procedures. This article includes one aspect of the research findings: practitioners' goals in such decisions. Specifically, the authors will detail how practitioners' perspectives about the primacy of particular goals of the child's care influenced their decisions to encourage or discourage parents from remaining with their children during invasive procedures. It was found that participants' decisions whether or not to permit parents to remain during invasive procedures were primarily determined by what the practitioner held as the priority goal of his/her practice (i.e., efficiency or family-centred care). The authors conclude by identifying some clinical and research directives that arise from the research findings.