Clinical trial NCT01371864: Families and Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Multidisciplinary Teams: How Well Do We Communicate
Official title: Families and Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Multidisciplinary Teams: How Well Do We Communicate?
Study type: OBSERVATIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Conditions: Communication
Keywords: Congenital cardiac disease
Teamwork
Communication
Peri-operative
Lead sponsor: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2011-06-13
Enrollment: 23
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Observational model: COHORT
Time perspective: PROSPECTIVE
Sampling method: NON_PROBABILITY_SAMPLE
Study population: The study population will be selected from a tertiary care academic children's hospital including:

* Inpatient population within the pediatric critical care unit, neonatal critical care unit, and the cardiac intermediate care unit.
* Outpatient population including the pediatric cardiothoracic surgery clinic patients.
* Hospital personnel

Brief summary: Purpose:

-To evaluate the peri-operative communication between families and the pediatric cardiac surgery team.

Method:

-In this study the investigators plan to utilize structured interview and survey of parents/legal guardians and health care providers of children undergoing cardiac surgery in the United States of America.

Detailed description: Every day clinicians face challenges when attempting to negotiate their way through dialogues with families whose children require surgical intervention in the near future. The area of clinician-patient communication with pediatric families is under-researched and highlights a pressing clinical problem. There are several adult studies that describe the content and nature of patient-physician communications at the time of cardiac surgery. However, there are no studies that evaluate the communications between nursing, physicians, and pediatric patient's families at the time of cardiac surgery. Further knowledge in this area is valuable in that a disparity between the these groups can lead to medical error, damage the clinician-patient relationship and provide grounds for dissatisfaction, complaints, or claim. This research will provide insight into what patient's families value in their communications with the medical team and assist the medical community in better meeting our children's families needs.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Primary language is English
* \> 18 years age
* Nurse, physician, physician assistant, or parent / legal guardian of a pediatric patient who requires cardiothoracic surgery at the North Carolina Children's Hospital.

Exclusion Criteria:

* Primary language is not English. The interviewers all speak English as their primary language. People whose primary language is other than English will only be excluded if they do not have the ability to converse in English with the interviewers.
* \<18 years of age. The parent / legal guardian must be of age to be the primary caregiver able to make decisions for their child.
* People with an intellectual or mental impairment that prohibits their capacity to make medical decisions for their child. Our research aims to investigate the relationship between the parent / legal guardians of pediatric cardiac surgery patients who interact with the pediatric cardiac surgery multidisciplinary team. These individuals must have sufficient mental capacity to be able to provide consent for their child to undergo surgery. Individuals with intellectual or mental impairment that prohibits their ability to give consent are therefore excluded.

Primary outcomes:
measure: Peri-operative risk information
timeFrame: 1 week
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Informed decisions
timeFrame: 1 week
measure: Trust in the medical team
timeFrame: 1 week
measure: Desire for disclosure of peri-operative complications
timeFrame: 1 week
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Chapel Hill
country: United States
facility: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
state: North Carolina
Study officials:
affiliation: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
name: Cherissa C Hanson, MD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: