What Counts as a NICU Family Meeting?: A Qualitative Study of Parent and Professional Perspectives

Interdisciplinary family meetings reduce parental traumatic stress and promote shared decisions in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Existing definitions of family meetings derive from adult studies. NICUs need NICU-specific criteria reflecting their distinct clinical and psychosocial context.

To identify NICU parent and clinician values and expectations about the structure and functions of family meetings to develop a NICU-specific definition and checklist for quantifying neonatal family meetings.

Qualitative thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with parents and clinical professionals recruited from an academic, quaternary-care NICU.

Thirteen parents and 25 professionals (16 nurses, 7 neonatologists, 2 social workers) defined a NICU family meeting as a seated, serious conversation in a private room involving a patient's parents, nurse, and neonatologist. This definition translated to a checklist capturing meeting location and participants. Participants differentiated "meetings" ("serious" conversations needed when parents and professionals lack a shared understanding of the child's condition) from "updates" ("general" parent-professional conversations). Participants identified logistical and cultural barriers to holding crucial meetings and generated solutions.

This study identified nurse presence and participation as essential for serious conversations with NICU families. Nursing and hospital leaders can implement the resultant NICU-centered definition and checklist for neonatal family meetings into health informatic systems to promote parent-professional communication and to prospectively monitor unit-wide family-centered care.

Future research should validate the checklist across diverse NICUs, assess its impact on family outcomes, and identify solutions to barriers limiting nurse participation in family meetings.