How doctors communicated with parents in a neonatal intensive care: Communication and ethical issues

Aim: Doctors have a moral and legal obligation to keep patients and their families informed, and this is an integral part of care. We explored the communication strategies used by doctors when they spoke to parents in a French neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

Methods: This was a single-centre qualitative pilot study carried out from October 2015 to January 2016. We asked five doctors (three female) to audiotape their discussions with the parents of newborn infants during their NICU stay. The doctors' mean age was 43 years, and they had a mean of 14 years of NICU experience. Each discussion was subjected to thematic content analysis.

Results: We analysed 40 discussions carried out between doctors on 26 newborn infants. Five communication strategy themes emerged: building understanding, how the communication was constructed, the role of the doctor, and of the parents, in the overall care of the newborn infant and how the information given to the parents developed over time.

Conclusion: Analysing the content of the information discussed with parents provided us with the opportunity to understand the communication and ethical issues surrounding the delivery of information in a NICU. This could be used to improve future discussions between doctors and parents.