| Summary: | While family-centered care is the desired model for pediatric care in hospitals worldwide, it is not always used to guide practice in inpatient pediatric hospital settings due to three main barriers. These barriers include decreased communication and collaboration between families and healthcare professionals, decreased understanding of parents’ needs and expectations for involvement in care, and a lack of clinical guidelines for how to best incorporate families in care. In effort to bridge the communication gap between parents and healthcare professionals and gain an understanding of ways to effectively carry out a family-centered care model, a quality improvement project was conducted at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital on the Pediatrics unit in collaboration with the occupational therapy department. The project involved four components: interviewing parents regarding their preference for involvement in their child’s care, communicating these preferences to occupational therapists, administering a survey to parents to assess parent satisfaction with their involvement in care, and providing recommendations to Spaulding. Results indicated that parents at Spaulding are very satisfied with their communication with therapists and with their involvement in care. Results also indicated that all parents report a desire to be involved in their child’s care, however, that preference for type of involvement varies by family. This demonstrated the importance of asking families about their preference for involvement at the beginning of their hospital stay and communicating their preferences to the team. Recommendations include mechanisms that can be incorporated into occupational therapists’ daily workflow to operationalize a family-centered care model.
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