The Family Snapshot-Innovation to integrate family context into daily interactions in the NICU

Current literature favours individualised decision making, an approach that requires understanding patients within their context and tailoring treatment and recommendations to their unique needs. In neonatology, family context becomes synonymous with patient context. In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), the team may be challenged to understand the intricacies of the family context, paramount for both families and clinicians. However, a significant gap exists between the intent to share information about the family context and the process of doing so. The transformational goal of this project was to embed an understanding of the family context into all interactions that occur in the NICU between clinicians and families, and between clinicians when discussing patients.

We designed and implemented the Family Snapshot (FS), an innovation to bridge the gap between the intent and the process to share the family context.

Two groups of process measures have been collected to understand workflow integration: (1) whether the forms are being used and (2) how the forms are being used. Overall, completion of at least some part of the FS was >90%.

This manuscript describes our process, its feasibility and impact and presents two tools, the FS antenatal consultations and the FS tab.