Measuring communication quality in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Background High quality communication between providers and parents of seriously ill neonatal patients is vital and yet poorly understood. Feudtner summarized five challenges and seven priorities to the study and advancement of pediatric palliative care. Improvement of communication is a priority, while lack of specification and measurement of outcomes relevant to the pediatric population remains a challenge. Specifically, measurement of communication quality in pediatrics, and especially neonatology, is problematic. Methods We conducted a focused review of this topic which we hope will serve to support further research. We reviewed the current literature in Pubmed and searched the Palliative Care Research Cooperative (PCRC) instrument library. Results We found five validated instruments which met our criteria, relied on patient or surrogate report, and were developed to measure quality of communication and/or satisfaction with communication with adult patients or their surrogates. Our Pubmed search yielded 249 unique results, only two of which met our inclusion criteria. Conclusion We conclude that development and exhaustive testing of a validated, comprehensive measure of communication quality for the neonatal population is needed. Without such a measure, it will be difficult to advance the field and achieve high quality prognostic communication for the parents of seriously ill babies. Impact Measurement of communication quality in pediatrics, and especially neonatology, is problematic, understudied, and yet critical to the advancement of the field. There has not been an overview of existing measures of communication quality in the NICU published, nor has there been a comprehensive discussion of this important topic. Our paper provides such an overview and initiates such a discussion. We present a narrative review of existing measures of communication quality in the NICU in order to highlight the need for further study.

Automated summary

Communication quality measurement in pediatrics, especially in neonatology, is a challenging and understudied area that is crucial for the advancement of the field. Despite the lack of existing measures specifically for the NICU, our focused review identified validated instruments for adult patients that could potentially be adapted for neonatal populations. Further research is needed to develop a comprehensive tool for assessing communication quality in the NICU.