Families and Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Multidisciplinary Teams: How Well Do We Communicate

Every day clinicians face challenges when attempting to negotiate their way through dialogues with families whose children require surgical intervention in the near future. The area of clinician-patient communication with pediatric families is under-researched and highlights a pressing clinical problem. There are several adult studies that describe the content and nature of patient-physician communications at the time of cardiac surgery. However, there are no studies that evaluate the communications between nursing, physicians, and pediatric patient's families at the time of cardiac surgery. Further knowledge in this area is valuable in that a disparity between the these groups can lead to medical error, damage the clinician-patient relationship and provide grounds for dissatisfaction, complaints, or claim. This research will provide insight into what patient's families value in their communications with the medical team and assist the medical community in better meeting our children's families needs.

Inclusion criteria

• Primary language is English
• > 18 years age
• Nurse, physician, physician assistant, or parent / legal guardian of a pediatric patient who requires cardiothoracic surgery at the North Carolina Children's Hospital.

Exclusion criteria

• Primary language is not English. The interviewers all speak English as their primary language. People whose primary language is other than English will only be excluded if they do not have the ability to converse in English with the interviewers.
• <18 years of age. The parent / legal guardian must be of age to be the primary caregiver able to make decisions for their child.
• People with an intellectual or mental impairment that prohibits their capacity to make medical decisions for their child. Our research aims to investigate the relationship between the parent / legal guardians of pediatric cardiac surgery patients who interact with the pediatric cardiac surgery multidisciplinary team. These individuals must have sufficient mental capacity to be able to provide consent for their child to undergo surgery. Individuals with intellectual or mental impairment that prohibits their ability to give consent are therefore excluded.