Family centred care is said to be used widely in practice. More research is needed to ensure that is it being implemented correctly.

This update of a review has found limited, moderate-quality evidence that suggests some benefit of a family-centred care intervention for children's clinical care, parental satisfaction, and costs, but this is based on a small dataset and needs confirmation in larger RCTs. There is no evidence of harms. Overall, there continues to be little high-quality quantitative research available about the effects of family-centred care. Further rigorous research on the use of family-centred care as a model for care delivery to children and families in hospitals is needed. This research should implement well-developed family-centred care interventions, ideally in randomised trials. It should investigate diverse participant groups and clinical settings, and should assess a wide range of outcomes for children, parents, staff and health services.

Word War II brought about changes enabling emergence of lobby groups concerned with children in hospital, awakening of pediatric health professionals to family-oriented practice, and development of models of care that allowed widescale adoption of FCC.

No abstract

Family-centred care is a ubiquitous term in paediatric health facilities. It means that an admitted child can never be treated as a single individual patient, that the family is the unit of care, as the parents and family are central to the child’s wellbeing, especially during traumatic experiences. There is no rigorous evidence that family-centred care works, but qualitative research is drawing out some grave concerns with how it is implemented. Part of the problem is that there are many descriptions of family-centred care, but few definitions, and some of its component parts may be in place in some health services without the whole model being in place. This causes confusion amongst health professionals and parents and children, and makes it impossible to test in a randomised controlled trial. This paper discusses these problems and suggests that a new model, child-centred care, may be a better model of care for children.

Adopting a philosophy of family centred care can enable health providers and health professionals to provide lesbian, gay and transgender families with inclusive non-discriminatory care.

Educators can develop programs that provide students with knowledge and skills to ensure lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families receive effective health care when they access services for their children.

Practitioners must be aware that family-centred care is a wonderful ideal that is almost impossible to implement and so new ways of delivering care to children may be needed.