Health Care Staff Support for Mothers in NICU: A Focused Ethnography Study

Abstract Background: Mothers of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) have complex needs and require a significant amount of support during the NICU admission. However, little is known about mothers support needs in the NICU. The aim of study was to explore mothers and health staff experiences and care practices meeting support needs of the mothers in the NICU. Methods: A focused ethnographic approach was adopted. Observation and interviews with 21 mothers, 18 nurses and 5 physicians were undertaken over a seven month period. Qualitative data analysis was conducted using the Roper and Shapira (2000) five-step framework. Result: Two main themes of “Insufficient attention to mothers’ support needs (Subthemes: inadequate accompany the mother in care, assigning monitoring and care to the mother, inadequate sharing of medical information) and “Supporting the mothers in certain circumstances” (Subthemes: reassuring the mother, supporting mothers with reduced functional capacity, providing information) were obtained. Conclusion: This study showed that, there is a gap exists between the level of expected support and the actual support received by mothers. In this study, Staff support for mothers was selective support that in many cases was inadequate and so support was provided only when the mother greatly needed support. However, most staff considered meeting maternal support as a necessity, they often confirmed inadequate maternal support in NICU and considered workload as a barrier to maternal support.