"Losing Thomas & Ella" presents a research comic about one father's perinatal loss of twins. The comic recounts Paul's experience of the hospital and the babies' deaths, and it details the complex grieving process afterward, including themes of…
PURPOSE: To explore how nurses manage personal and professional boundaries in caring for seriously ill children and their families., DESIGN AND METHODS: Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, a convenience sample of 18 registered nurses…
BACKGROUND: The concept of pediatric palliative care (PPC) is applied differently within the healthcare system and among healthcare professionals (HCPs). To our knowledge, no studies have investigated how multidisciplinary HCPs understand the concept…
OBJECTIVE: To metasynthesize the results of qualitative studies on the factors that affect parents' participation in pain management for their infants during procedures in the NICU. DATA SOURCES: We conducted a literature search for articles…
Illness narratives have become very popular. The stories of children, however, are rarely ever studied. This paper aims to provide insight into how children, parents and physicians make sense of progressive childhood cancer. It also explores how this…
We read with interest Sriraman et al's (2023)1 response to our article ‘Resuscitation thresholds were seen as guidance by Belgian neonatologists and other relevant factors were included in decision-making’.2 We appreciate that other institutions use…
BACKGROUND: There is a dearth of literature that investigates life transitions of young adults (YAs) with life-limiting conditions, families and professionals. The scant literature that is available has methodological limitations, including not…
The effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence, called narrative medicine, is…
OBJECTIVE: To describe how paediatricians undertake the process of end-of-life decision-making for a child with a life-limiting condition who is unable to participate in decision-making for themselves. DESIGN: A qualitative phenomenological study…
How should researchers reflexively evaluation ways in which intersubjective elements transform their research? The process of engaging in reflexivity is full of muddy ambiguity and multiple trails as researchers negotiate the swamp of interminable…
BACKGROUND: End-of-Life care and experiencing death of infants, children, and teenagers remain one of the most difficult and traumatic events for nurses and nursing students, potentially leading to personal and professional distress. Although efforts…
Open and honest communication has been identified as an important factor in providing good palliative care. However, there is no easy solution to if, when, and how parents and a dying child should communicate about death. This article reports how…
Fieldnotes are a vital part of ethnographic research, yet little attention has been paid to the practical details of note-taking. Exactly how does an ethnographer decide what to write about? This article uses fieldnotes from various sources to show…
PURPOSE: Pediatric palliative care (PC) is an evolving field and involves a comprehensive approach to care of children with cancer. The goal of this paper was to explore how pediatric oncologists define, interpret, and practice pediatric palliative…
BACKGROUND: Fathers' interactions with children who have intellectual disabilities (ID) or developmental delays (DD) have increased over the past few decades and may be expected to continue to increase as maternal and paternal roles, along with other…
In 1997, the Oregon Death with Dignity Act was enacted, allowing physicians to prescribe lethal dosages of medication to competent, terminally ill patients who request them. To improve our understanding of physicians' reactions to requests for…
The objective of this qualitative study was to explore the perceptions and needs of families who care for a child with a life-limiting disease. Considering the heterogeneity of life-limiting diseases in childhood, three diagnostic groups were…
Background: Provision of paediatric palliative care for children with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions and their families is often complex. Guidelines can support professionals to deliver high quality care. Stakeholders expressed the need…
Study objective: Children with medical complexity represent a fragile population and account for the majority of patients followed in pediatric palliative care. Little is known in regard to the role of the emergency department (ED) in caring for the…
OBJECTIVE: To explore the end-of-life experience of children with brain tumors and their families. DESIGN: Qualitative analysis of focus group interviews. SETTING: Children's Hospital, London Health Sciences Center. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-five parents…
OBJECTIVES: Children with medical complexity (CMC) have high readmission rates, but relatively little is known from the parent perspective regarding care experiences surrounding and factors contributing to readmissions. We aimed to elicit parent…
This descriptive qualitative study explored parent experiences related to their infant's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) hospitalization, end-of-life care, and palliative care consultation. "Life and death in the NICU environment" emerged as the…
OBJECTIVE: To assess the perception of parents concerning the state of comfort maintained in their infants born with life-limiting conditions and treated by a standardized neonatal comfort care program. STUDY DESIGN: Participants were parents (n=35…
The ultimate aim of our research program is to provide strategies that facilitate parental decision-making for parents of children with cancer receiving end-of-life care. As a first step to develop this program, we needed insight into parents'…
Respite in children's palliative care aims to provide a break for family's from the routine of caring. Parental decision-making regarding the utilisation of out-of-home respite is dependent on many interlinking factors including the…
Background: Clinicians and parents are expected to make medical treatment decisions in the child's best interests. To reach their decisions, clinicians typically apply a principled approach outlined by Beauchamp and Childress. How parents make…
Parenting and providing extensive care to a child with a life-limiting or life-threatening disease while being aware of the future loss of the child are among the most stressful parental experiences. Due to technical and medical improvements,…
Background: Parents of children with a life-limiting disease have to rely on themselves at home while adequate paediatric palliative care is lacking. In several countries, paediatric palliative care teams are introduced to ensure continuity and…
BACKGROUND: The death of a child is a devastating event that results in profound grief and significant psychosocial and physical morbidities in parents. The parental grief journey is a complex phenomenon necessitating the utilization of newer models…
OBJECTIVE: To examine whether physicians or parents assume responsibility for treatment decisions for critically ill children and how this relates to subsequent parental experience. A significant controversy has emerged regarding the role of parents,…
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Forgoing artificial nutrition and hydration (FANH) in children at the end of life (EOL) is a medically, legally, and ethically acceptable practice under speci fi c circumstances. However, most of the evidence on FANH…
OBJECTIVES: To explore the perceptions of parents caring for a child with a life-limiting condition on approaches to communication used by clinicians engaging in routine serious illness communication. METHODS: An exploratory qualitative design was…
OBJECTIVE: To systematically review and synthesise qualitative research exploring parents/carers' experiences of seeking online information and support for long-term physical childhood conditions. DESIGN: Systematic review and thematic synthesis of…
Background/Objectives: The purpose of the current study was to describe the lived experience of parents with a child with incurable cancer at the end of life (EOL). Design/Methods: A qualitative study was conducted following a phenomenological…
Purpose: To analyse the preference of end of life care place in paediatric oncology patients, and to understand the end of life care needs and regrets among the care givers. Method(s): This was an observational qualitative study. Parents of…
Aim: This work explores the experiences and meaning attributed by parents who underwent the decision-making process of withholding and/or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment for their newborn. Methods: Audio-recorded face-to-face interviews were…
Objective: A proportion of children die, making them potentially eligible to be organ/tissue donors. Not all are approached for donation, and experiences of those parents are not well understood. The objective was to investigate to what extent organ…
