Exploring the impact of the COVID‐19 environment on nursing delivery of family‐centred care in a paediatric hospital

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To understand how the pandemic environment impacted the delivery of FCC of children and families from a nursing perspective in a major tertiary paediatric hospital. BACKGROUND: Family‐centred care (FCC) is a well‐established framework to promote parental involvement in every aspect of a child's hospitalization, however, rules and restrictions in place during the COVID‐19 pandemic affected the ways in which Family‐centred Care could be delivered in practice. DESIGN: This is a qualitative exploratory descriptive study to elicit the perspective of paediatric nurses delivering care to children in a hospital during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia. METHODS: Nurses from all subspecialties in a tertiary paediatric hospital were invited to participate in virtual focus groups to discuss their experience of delivering FCC during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Focus groups were recorded and transcribed, then analysed using Framework Analysis. RESULTS: Nineteen nurses participated across seven focus groups during June and July 2020. The four themes—Advocating with empathy, Enabling communication, Responding with flexibility, and Balancing competing considerations—and the eight subthemes that were generated, outline how nurses deliver FCC, and how these FCC actions were impacted by the COVID‐19 environment and the related hospital restrictions. CONCLUSION: This study documents the experiences, resilience and resourcefulness of paediatric nurses in Australia during the COVID‐19 pandemic as well as moving Family‐centred Care from a theoretical framework into a practical reality. IMPACT: The findings from this study should inform consideration of the impacts of public health policies during infectious disease outbreaks moving forward. In addition by describing the core actions of Family‐centred Care, this study has implications for educational interventions on how to translate FCC theory into practice. No public or patient contribution as this study explored nursing perceptions only.