Coping and Caring in Different Ways: Understanding and Meaningful Involvement

Pediatric Nursing, March, 2000 by Nancy Sydnor-Greenberg, Deborah Dokken

Conclusion

Although the NICU experience is frightening and uncertain for families, nurses can play a significant role in helping them cope with the experience itself and feel confident about caring for their medically fragile babies. This is most effectively done by enabling families to utilize their own unique coping and caring strategies. By integrating the five frameworks, family-centered care, cultural context, loss and grief, personal style, and the caregiver's own value system, and with skillful assessment and planning, nurses can provide families with support that is individualized and meaningful.

Acknowledgment: The authors want to thank the three families who were willing to share their own NICU stories in order to benefit other families. In order to preserve family confidentiality, only first names are used.

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