Components of Family Meetings for Hospitalized Children With Serious Illness: A Scoping Review

Family meetings between pediatric clinicians and parents are used to facilitate in-depth discussions and decision-making about patient care. To guide implementation of family meetings for hospitalized children with medical complexity, this scoping review identified the common components of family meetings for hospitalized pediatric patients with serious illness across pediatric subspecialties.

To describe key components of family meetings for hospitalized pediatric patients with serious illness.

With the assistance of a professional librarian, we searched 5 databases.

We included primary research studies describing planned interactions between 2 or more health care providers and family decision-makers for hospitalized children with serious illness.

We extracted components of family meetings, which we organized based on timing (before, during, and after the meeting) and combined thematically.

We evaluated 11 151 title/abstracts, reviewed 77 full-text articles, and included 23 articles describing 21 studies. Most studies focused on meetings in intensive care units (96%), were conducted in the United States (91%), and were published after 2020 (52%). We identified 15 components occurring before (n = 4), during (n = 8), and after (n = 3) family meetings. Components included both specific tasks (identify need for a meeting) and communication goals (assess and support understanding). Most components were identified through study observations rather than recommendations made by the researchers.

There is a developing body of evidence about family meetings, which is largely focused on intensive care settings, that can inform development of targeted research to support implementation of family meetings in pediatric hospital medicine.