Meet Our Speakers:
The adult intensive care unit (ICU) is a high acuity and technical environment which historically has excluded child visitors. Today, most ICUs in Alberta have no restrictions on child visitors, but many families are hesitant to bring children to the bedside. Families may feel that the ICU is not a safe place for children, they may fear that children would find visiting critically ill family members distressing, and they may worry they do not have the capacity to support their child’s needs. When children do visit, healthcare providers (HCP) are often tasked with supporting them without developmentally appropriate training or resources to guide how to best support the child’s needs in crisis.
Our team, funded through ANET, has embarked on a multiphase project to explore facilitators and barriers to child visitors in adult ICUs and to identify ways to support them. We have completed the first phase of this project, surveying healthcare providers about perceived facilitators and barriers to child visitors. In the next phase of research, we seek to better understand families’ perceptions of child visitors, children’s needs, and perceived barriers to visiting to create a family-centered, family-informed approach to supporting child visitors in ICU. We intend to use the outcomes of this research program to develop a framework to support child visitors that could be incorporated into ICUs across Alberta, either directly or with local adaptation as needed. Understanding family perspectives on child visitors in ICU and identifying perceived barriers, facilitators, and needs is an important next step to address this current care gap.
Mia-Bernadine Torres has first hand experience as a child visitor in ICU which has informed her career as an nurse. Jessica Jenkins is an NP in ICU and Adjunct Faculty with the University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing.
