Family Integrated Care launches in NICU
Family Integrated Care, or FICare, has launched in Sunnybrook's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), a model that will enable parents to take an even more active front-line role at their infant's bedside.
"FICare is a natural evolution of our current Family Centred Care model in the NICU. The goal is to support parents in becoming more involved in their infant's care while in hospital, as bona fide partners of the healthcare team," says Cathy Travell, FICare coordinator at Sunnybrook.
As of September 9, every family with an infant in the NICU will be given the opportunity to participate in FICare. "Parents can be involved in their baby's care to whatever degree they are comfortable with. FICare empowers a parent to become knowledgeable about their baby's care, and builds their confidence in their ability to care for their baby after they go home," says Travell.
At the same time, Sunnybrook will also begin recruiting families to participate in the FICare Study. The study, which involves 19 other NICUs across Canada, requires a parent to spend at least six to eight hours per day participating in the care of their infant, including attending parent education sessions and receiving one-on-one teaching at the bedside.
"The primary goal of this innovative study is to see if FICare leads to improvement in outcomes such as weight gain, hospital length of stay, as well as measures of patient safety, parental stress, and family satisfaction," says Dr. Eugene Ng, chief of newborn and developmental paediatrics at Sunnybrook and a co-investigator of the clinical trial.
In addition to participating in an expanded education program, parents will also be journaling about their infants. This includes recording data on basic care, such as weight, feeds, diaper changes, and skin-to-skin contact. Parents will not replace nursing care, but will actively participate in daily rounds with the inter-professional team.
"When my baby was in the NICU at Sunnybrook, I felt welcomed and encouraged to participate in her care, and I firmly believe that made a huge difference to my baby and my family," says Kate Robson, Sunnybrook's NICU parent coordinator. "I am so pleased that this study will help us to continue to invite parents into the circle of care, and to expand the support services we offer to families."
Staff members in the NICU have been living and breathing such a model of care for many years, says Dr. Ng. "By implementing FICare as a standard in our unit, we are formalizing what we've been practicing all along. We look forward to contributing important data to this clinical trial, which hopefully will provide evidence that FICare is the ideal model of care for NICU patients."
