Pediatrics & Neonatology

Aim: The study aims to find out the nurses’ opinions, experiences and suggested remedial measures related to family integration

in neonatal units of a tertiary care hospital, India.

Method: The study was conducted at neonatal units (level 3/step down unit), of a tertiary care center, India. The 20 nurses working in the neonatal care were included. The ethical clearance was obtained from institute’s ethics committee. The written informed consent was taken, and five focus group discussions were conducted with 20 nurses in a group of 3-5 members for approximately 25-45 minutes. The data was saturated at five focus group discussions. All the interviews were recorded and thematic analysis was done.

Result: Major themes related to their opinion were, family is important and prior absolute need to involve families, family involvement will increase weight, bonding, feeding and support the mother. Current experiences revealed that more focus is on mother, minimal involvement of father, teaching is offered in gradual manner, father is never taught and most of the information about baby condition is provided by doctors. They also experienced some barriers during family involvement such as level of parental education, exhausted physical and emotional state of mother, limited involvement of father, shortage

of time, staff and gender bias. The participants were also asked about the perceived barriers if integration process would be enhanced in unit. In that context the main concerns were about time and content of classes, varying teaching ability of every nurse, issues related to involvement of father, resistance to include fathers, difficult to coordinate the timing and fear of overcrowding. The remedial measures suggested were to involve families from antenatal period, family members other than parents should be included, need to structure integration process, counsel families before admission, provide information and counsel mother weekly, need to divide work and organize regular teaching session for family.

Conclusion: Nurses had positive attitude about family integration and they want it to be more structured and organized. At the same time, they were also concerned about time and content of classes, individual differences in teaching skills, division of work, coordination related issues and overcrowding.