Nurses’ moral agency in negotiating parental participation in care

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the issues for nurses in facilitating parental participation in the care of the hospitalized child. A qualitative study informed by grounded theory was undertaken. Nine nurses were recruited from an acute, high-dependency, 23-bed paediatric cardiac/renal unit in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection involved individual semistructured interviews, hospital policies related to family-centred care and a focus group interview. Constant comparative analysis was undertaken to develop an understanding of the data collected in the context of the nurses' experiences and the environment in which they work. Moral agency was identified as the central phenomenon of the study. Causal conditions related to this included the child's best interests, disputes about care and nurses' expectations. These causal conditions were seen to potentially lead to moral distress for the nurses. The coping mechanisms and strategies that affected moral agency have been identified.

Family‐centred care in the paediatric intensive care unit: an integrative review of the literature

“…Four of the papers discussed the role of the nurse and family in the PICU (Martens et al . , O'Haire & Blackford , Ames et al . , Macdonald et al .…”

“…The researcher bias was also not discussed in any of the qualitative studies that used interviews or observation. The main strengths of the studies assessed surround either multimodal data collection (Jefferson & Paterson , O'Haire & Blackford , Aronson et al . , Cameron et al .…”

Roles of nurses and parents caring for hospitalised children

“…Although there is a growing body of literature on the views of nurses and parents about their respective roles in caring for hospitalised children, there seems to be no clear consensus as to what these roles are or how they should be negotiated (O'Haire and Blackford 2005). A study by Hughes (2007) found that nurses often assumed parents would wish to participate actively in the nursing care of their hospitalised child.…”

Partnering with parents in a pediatric ambulatory care setting: a new model

“…These authors assert that negotiation depends on the development of relationships between the family and health care providers (Corlett & Twycross, 2006b). In fact, power struggles are still associated with parental participation in their children's care (Coyne, 2008a;Coyne & Cowley, 2007;Lee, 2007;Martenson et al, 2009;McPherson et al, 2011;Priddis & Shields, 2011) and a gap exists between nurses' expectations and parents' attitudes (O'Haire & Blackford, 2005;Young et al, 2006).…”