When a child comes into hospital, the whole family is affected. In giving care, nurses, doctors and those caring for the child must consider the impact of the child's admission on all the family members. 'Family-centred care' (FCC) has developed as one way of caring for children in hospital. FCC means that during a hospital admission, care is planned by the health staff around the whole family, not just the individual child. However, with the way family structures are changing in society, questions are being asked about how care is best delivered. To make sure that children are cared for in ways that minimise emotional trauma and assist in recovery, it is important that such ways of delivering care are measured to see if they are effective.
This review has tried to do that by examining research about family-centred care. We assessed potentially-relevant studies against criteria that identify important parts of FCC. Despite extensive searching we found no studies we could include in this review which would allow us to measure the effectiveness of FCC. We did find 13 studies which described, using qualitative research, aspects of FCC, and we have written a separate paper about these. Our main conclusion from this review, however, is that more research, using factors which can be measured, is needed to assess whether FCC really works to improve a child's experience of hospitalisation.