Title : Strengths and Barriers to Implementing Family Centered Care: Towards a CCC Approach
Abstract:
Family centered care (FCC) is the mutually beneficial partnership’s among health care providers, children and families. Holistic FCC is a heath care model. Family centered care (FCC) sets parents at the centre of the child’s care. If FCC is to be used effectively in practice, families and health professionals need to collaborate and work as equal partners toward planning care. Essential to FCC is understanding parent’s needs. By measuring parent’s needs in the clinical area we can identify additional support needs of parents to cope with their child’s illness and how effective of our efforts to integrate the parents into the child’s care. Some studies suggest that a lack of effective communication and issues of power and control often inhibit open negotiation between families and health care professionals. In addition, government policy, finances, public or private health care, culture, service delivery differences and availability of staff are some of the factors influencing the delivery of FCC.
I will discuss the results of an international comparison study about FCC from three countries ( USA, Turkey, Australia). This study is related to compare how healthcare providers with varied cultural and healthcare systems perceive FCC by measuring attitudes and to identify family-centeredness. We used ‘The Working with Families’ questionnaire to capture participant’s perceptions of caring for hospitalized children and their parents from pediatric health professionals in three countries ( n=476). Nurses demonstrated a significantly less discrepancy in their affective response to working with children and working with parents and more congruent with FCC than physicians. More positive attitudes reported for working with children than working with parents for all countries. How parents as partners in care can ocur when the environment is not supportive. On the other hand, in our study family centeredness scores were different between nurses and physicians and significantly correlated with age, number of children and education.
RC Trials and quasi-experimental studies in Cochrane and JBI review showed no evidence FCC works or is effective (2012). It is important to understand the barriers to implementing FCC. FCC remains the ideal but implementation of FCC is not working. Nowadays there is a conceptual move from FCC to a child -centered care (CCC) approach. CCC means that children and their interest need to be at the centre of our thinking and our practice. In CCC model trust, autunomy and self determination are essential concepts. In CCC approach entails recognition of children’s right to participation in health care decisions. CCC also stil recognises centarlity of parents for well-being of children. Strengths and challenges of FCC and CCC will discuss.
