Pediatric Nursing Care

Pediatric Nursing Care

• Family-centered care:
  • Recognize the family as a constant in the child’s life
  • Support the competence of the family
  • Address the needs of all family members
  • Enable and empower families
• Key elements of Family-Centered Care
  • Incorporating into policy and practice the recognition that the family is the constant in a child’s life, whereas the service systems and support personnel within those systems fluctuate
  • Facilitating family-professional collaboration at all levels of hospital, home, and community care:
    • Care of an individual child
    • Program development, implementation, and evaluation
    • Policy formation
  • Exchanging complete and unbiased information between family members and professionals in a supportive manner at all times
  • Incorporating into policy and practice the recognition and honoring of cultural diversity, strengths, and individuality within and across all families, including ethnic, racial, spiritual, social, economic, educational, and geographic diversity
  • Recognizing and respecting different methods of coping and implementing comprehensive policies and programs that provide developmental, educational, emotional, environmental, and financial support to meet the diverse needs of families
  • Encouraging and facilitating family-to-family support and networking
  • Ensuring that home, hospital, and community service and support systems for children needing specialized health and developmental care and their families are flexible, accessible, and comprehensive in responding to diverse family-identified needs
  • Appreciating families as families and children as children, recognizing that they possess a wide range of strengths, concerns, emotions, and aspirations beyond their need for specialized health and developmental services and support

• Empowerment describes the interaction of professionals with families in such a way that families maintain or acquire a sense of control over their family lives and acknowledge positive changes that result from helping behaviors that foster their own strengths, abilities, and actions.