Parents and Nurses View of Continuity of Care

¶ … Baird, J., Rehm, R., Hinds, P., Baggot, C., Davies, B. (2016). Do you know my child?

Continuity of nursing care in the pediatric intensive care unit. Nursing Research, 65(2): 142-150.

Barid et al. (2016) provide a grounded theory, qualitative assessment of seven parents and 12 nurses using in-depth interviews with participants, observational assessment, and documents from within the organization under scrutiny in order to "explore the delivery of continuity of nursing care in the PICU from the perspective of both parents and nurses" (p. 142). The researchers describe continuity of nursing as being very important to parents, as they feel that there is better consistency of quality care when there is consistency within the ranks of the staff in terms of how nurses treat patients, how prompt they are, how their persona is and how well they interact with patients and parents, etc. Through the conducting of interviews with parents, the researchers showed that they want their child to be valued and treated with the best care by the nursing staff and that for this reason continuity is important, because lapses in care and consideration can result from inconsistency within the ranks and a lack of continuation of quality care, as nurses' shifts end and nurses are replaced by perhaps less experienced nurses or new nurses, etc.

The study reveals, however, that there are obstacles in the way of parents receiving their wishes for continuity of care in the PICU; as interviews with nurses reveal, there are significant contextual/personal obstacles that block the goal of obtaining pure continuity of care; these are structural as well as practical and include the fact that nurses must meet staffing requirement needs (sometimes to the detriment of providing optimal quality care to patients), training needs (which can reduce the amount of time that nurses can give to patients), issues regarding emotional involvement with patients which can serve to undermine the continuity process (nurses and patients become attached to one another and throw off the intricately balanced and nuanced nurse staffing arrangement schedule), and issues regarding learning opportunities for various nurses, who in order to learn more within their professional spheres are required to attend to a variety of patients.