Family-centred care research in paediatrics: A scoping review.
Ashleigh E Butler, Lael Ridgway, Ellen M Henderson and 9 others
PMID 40298884WHAT IT FOUND
Paediatric family-centred care research is broad but uneven: 579 studies were mostly cross-sectional surveys, hospital-based and North American, with inconsistent definitions and limited father, sibling and non-English family input.
Key findings
01The review included 579 articles, and although 334 were quantitative, experimental studies accounted for only 20.4% of quantitative articles.
02Most included studies were conducted in North America, with 314 of 579 in the United States, and 360 were hospital-based; Africa and Southeast Asia were least represented.
03Only 313 of 579 studies defined family-centred care, nurses were the largest healthcare provider group, and fathers and siblings were less represented.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Only English-language articles were searched. Research from non-English-speaking settings may be missing. The search stopped in March 2021. It may not reflect later pandemic-era changes in family access or telehealth. Many included studies did not report funding, author discipline, methods, setting or exclusion criteria clearly. This makes the literature map less precise. Only first and last author affiliations were extracted. Multidisciplinary teams may be underrepresented. Studies may have been missed if family-centred care terms did not appear in the title, aims or methods. This is a scoping review, not a synthesis of treatment effects. It does not show whether family-centred care improves outcomes.
Declared interests
Research assistance was funded by La Trobe University. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that family-centred care improves paediatric outcomes. It is a scoping review of 579 studies, most of which were cross-sectional surveys, and only 20.4% of quantitative studies were experimental.