Neglecting the Parent in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: The Communicational Factors that Increases the Iranian Parents’ Stress

Abstract

Many parents confront the NICU environment as medical staffs are busy with the physical aspects of care by ignoring other important needs and omitting physicians’ view. Aim: Identify essential factors in communication process that tend to increase stress among the NICU parents. The Study Design: Eighteen NICU parents from different hospitals in the city of Isfahan were selected for in-depth interviews. Qualitative content analysis included open coding, categorization and abstraction of data. Results: Data analysis identified stress provoking factors for NICU parents in four categories as confusion in nurse-parent, nurse-physician communication, negligence in physician-parent communication, inappropriate nurse-physician communication, and the medical diagnosis communication process. Conclusion: Our findings indicated that NICU parent presence was very low. It is necessary for the hospital management and NICU staff to develop communication skills training sessions for less stressful parent experiences in NICU. Moreover, the Ministry of Health should authorize policy development and guidelines to improve relationship between medical staff, physicians, nurses and NICU families aimed at better neonatal outcomes.