Compassionate Family Care Framework: A New Collaborative Compassionate Care Model for NICU Families and Caregivers

Compassion lies at the intersection of empathy (understanding families' concerns) and sympathy (feeling families' emotions), combined to elicit a response to the distress of others and a desire to alleviate that distress.1 A new Compassionate Family Care Framework (CFDC), incorporates these elements of compassion with affiliative relationships, bidirectional communications, and compassionate partnerships to achieve optimal quality of care for the vulnerable neonates and families we serve. Affiliative relationships address both the families' innate need for connection and relationships with health caregivers and the need for attachment and bonding between parents and their infant. Effective bidirectional communication empowers parents, making sense of control, decision making, taking responsibility, and achieving a realistic view towards their neonate's appearance and health condition. Creating compassionate partnerships with families strengthens a parent's sense of control and enhances their developing parent identity in the overwhelming and frightening neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The Compassionate Family Care Framework not only promotes family empowerment in the NICU, but also is a way of compassionately caring for infants and their families so that care is planned around the whole family, not just the infant.