Family member experience with restricted family presence in Canadian PICUs: an interpretive descriptive study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: We performed this study to explore family member experiences with restrictions to family presence during their child's PICU admission, leveraging the unique context of the COVID-19 pandemic to aid in future ethical and informed decision-making. METHODS: Qualitative interpretive descriptive study with family members of Canadian PICU patients admitted from March 2020 to April 2021 who experienced restricted family presence (RFP) policies. Respondents were purposively sampled for demographic-based maximum variation.We generated themes through inductive thematic analysis of open-ended interviews. RESULTS: Fourteen parental figures from five regions across Canada participated. We identified four themes associated with the lived experience and impact of the restrictions on family members of critically ill children: (1) challenges to fulfilling the parent role, (2) isolation from primary supports during a time of crisis, (3) navigating increased logistical difficulties, and (4) seeking compassionate approaches within the healthcare system. CONCLUSION: RFP policies created a range of barriers for family members of critically ill children. Healthcare organizations and teams may play a role in removing barriers through consistent and empathetic application of rules with consideration for the duality of the parent role in PICUs, providing important post-pandemic policy and practice implications. WHAT IS KNOWN: • Parental presence with critically ill children may improve health outcomes for patients and their families. • Restrictions to family presence in PICUs continue to occur internationally and, during COVID-19, resulted in parental isolation, anxiety, and increased stress. What is new: • By isolating family members and removing supports, COVID-19-related restrictions in Canadian PICUs challenged family members' ability to fulfil their parent roles while meeting their own needs. • Families need empathetic, advocacy-based approaches from clinicians and healthcare systems to maintain trust and therapeutic relationships in a family-centered organization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".