Abstract

Background: Family-centered care emphasizes the importance of providing services that demonstrate the value of collaboration between the health care provider, the child and the family. Despite the awareness of the importance of providing family-centered care, there is evidence that nurses have difficulty in actually developing deliberate care plans for the family. This study was conducted to determine the parentۥs’ views about the importance of principles of family-centered care in selected childrenۥs hospitals in Tehran.

Methods: This descriptive study explored the views of 150 parents in selected childrenۥs hospitals in Tehran about the principles of family-centered care using convenience sampling. Research tool was a two-part questionnaire including some demographic data and some questions about parents’ views. It was validated using content validity and its reliability was determined using Chronbakhs Alpha. The data was analyzed using inferential and descriptive tests.

Results: 96/7% (145) of parents for the Collaboration items, 94% (141) of parents for the Respect items, and 96% (144) of parents for the Support items ranked the “very important” item. The collaboration items was ranked higher in importance from the view of parents who had more children and whose hospitalized child had the higher offspring priority (P<0.01). About each of the three principles there were no differences in parents’ views based on parents’ and childrenۥs demographic data.

Conclusions:�Because of the high degree of importance of family-centered care principles in most parents’ view, we can expect that delivering the caring services with this method will fulfill all the parents’ and their hospitalized childۥs care needs and will result in their satisfaction from caring services.

Key words: Parent, View, Hospitalized child, Family-centered care