How to Involve Families in Hospital Care: Development, Content Validation, and Feasibility of a Concise Family Assessment Framework.
Josien M Woldring, Wolter Paans, Reinold O B Gans and 1 others
PMID 42057319WHAT IT FOUND
A brief family assessment framework for hospital admission was built from existing tools, validated by 34 experts, endorsed by 10 family members, and judged feasible by 10 nurses.
It guides conversations about family roles, needs and burden, not patient outcomes.
Key findings
01After two Delphi rounds, 34 experts helped validate a hospital family assessment framework.
02Ten family members found the framework relevant, clear and reflective of their experiences, and proposed no new items.
03Ten nurses found the framework clear, concise and flexible, and saw admission conversation as a natural place to use it.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study developed and validated a framework; it did not test whether family assessment improves patient outcomes, family experience, or caregiver burden. The expert panel was mostly Dutch and included physicians, nurses and researchers, so cultural generalisability is limited. Only 10 family members took part in two focus groups, so the range of family experiences was narrow. Only 10 nurses tested the framework, most had family care training, and they were recruited through professional networks. Feasibility testing had no quantitative indicators such as recruitment rates, fidelity, adherence or time burden. The literature search did not include caregiving or hospital-specific terms, so task-oriented caregiver tools may have been missed. Some nurses questioned whether the full framework is useful during very short admissions.
Declared interests
The authors report no funding and no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that this framework has been shown to improve care. The paper reports development, content validation and small feasibility interviews, not patient outcomes or a controlled test.