Clinical innovation for promoting family care in paediatric intensive care: demonstration, role modelling and reflective practice

Aim. To explore family caregiving problems in paediatric crisis care and methods that could be applied to move the abstraction of family care to development of specific family interventions. Background and rationale. Family centred care has been accepted as the ideal philosophy for holistic health care of children, but methods for its implementation are not well established. In paediatric health crises, family care requires special sensitivity to family needs and a type of complex nursing care for which many practitioners are not sufficiently prepared. Developing family sensitive models of intervention and finding a strategy for transfer of this knowledge to clinical practice is an important challenge facing family nursing today. Social learning theory provides a rich background to explore these issues. Conclusions. Specific techniques of role modelling and reflective practice are suggested as effective approaches to teach family sensitive care in clinical settings where families are part of the care environment.