Family-Centered Care and Collaboration: A Scoping Review of Medical Guidance for Parental Substance Use

A significant proportion of US families are affected by substance use disorders. Both child- and adult- serving systems are called upon to care for families, yet the disciplines involved inherently have different priorities, preventing a true family-centered care model.

The purpose of the scoping review was to explore the alignment of current national guidance related to the medical care of families affected by substance use disorders (SUD). In the review, we examined 1) the quality of the documents, 2) the documents' positions within the continuum of family-centered care and the promotion of multidisciplinary collaboration, and 3) potential gaps in the promotion of services for families.

We chose a priori to manually examine the websites of national medical and public health associations for clinical practice and policy recommendations. We included documents published between 2016 and 2023 with selected keywords, totaling seven documents for review. We operationalized and rated each document's recommendations based on their promotion of "family-centered care" and "multidisciplinary collaboration."

The quality of each document varied, with an average score of 5.2 out of 7. The average family-centeredness rating was 3.0 out of 7; five of the seven documents prioritized the parent's care over the child's. The average multidisciplinary collaboration rating was 2.8 out of 7.

Overall, we found low to moderate family-centered and multidisciplinary collaboration scores. Collectively, these findings suggest that despite these practices emerging as optimal for the care of families affected by SUD, the promotion of these practices has yet to be fully adopted in guidance statements by national medical disciplines.