The Parents' Perception of Nursing Support in their Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) Experience

NICU is an environment that has many challenges in information receiving and understanding. The infants that are cared for might have serious and complex medical problems. For Parents the NICU experience is filled with stress, fear, sadness, guilt and shock of having a sick baby in NICU. The aim of this research was to explore and describe parents' experience when their infant is admitted to the NICU. And assess their perception of nursing support of information provision and according to their emotional feelings. This study was undertaken at Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in King Abdulaziz Medical City (KAMC), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia which is part of National Guard Health Affairs (NGHA) organization in the kingdom. The study utilized a self-report questionnaire with likert scale measurement and telephone interview with closed questions. One hundred and four parents agree to be the part of study and provided their consent to include their children in the study. The majority of respondents were mothers (76%), the remaining (24%) from the total sample were Fathers. All their infants have been admitted to the NICU at 2014. Many parents did not able to receive enough information easily from the unit; most of them found the information by nurses was difficult to understand. The majority of parent's perceived high stress and anxiety level according to this information. Also, Most Parents was not agreed about the nurses' support towards their emotional feeling and care. Additional finding indicate that a decrease in support level being associated with an increase in stress and anxiety level. In order to provide a high level of support and decrease the level of stress, there is a need for developing support strategies. One strategy is through a technology to develop an automatic daily summary for parent.

@article{Magliyah2015,
  title     = {The Parents' Perception of Nursing Support in their Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) Experience},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {6},
  number    = {2},
  year      = {2015},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Amani F. Magliyah and Muhamamd I. Razzak},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060222},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060222}
}