Experience of parents with a healthy child(ren) and a child on ECMO
Research type
Research Study
Full title
What are the experiences of parents caring for the healthy siblings of a child with an acute illness requiring a intensive care stay on ECMO? An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis.
IRAS ID
168528
Contact name
Pippa Dell
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of East London
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 4 months, 31 days
Research summary
The study will explore the experiences of parents who have had an acutely ill child requiring an intensive care stay on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) whilst at the same time caring for a well siblings or siblings.
ECMO is a form of life-support provided to the most severely ill neonates and children who are unresponsive to conventional therapy. It provides prolonged but temporary mechanical support for cardiorespiratory failure.
Whilst it is recognised that having a child on ECMO can be extremely stressful for parents, currently there is a lack of research addressing the issue of healthy siblings and how this may impact on the parents ability to cope during hospitalisation and afterwards. Furthermore the research that exists tends to focus on long term critical illness in families rather than the shorter time frame and trauma of an acute episode of illness.
This research will focus on the parents of children who were well and then developed an acute respiratory illness that required an unexpected stay in intensive care on an invasive form of life support and that resulted in a full recovery. In depth interviews with parents will be used to develop a better understanding of any additional challenges and stresses experienced by parents. Greater insight will help staff to communicate with and support parents better during a very traumatic and difficult time. Furthermore, information gained from this study may enable resources to be targeted more effectively to help families, including healthy siblings.
Parents of children who have been supported on ECMO will be recruited from the hospital database if their child was on ECMO in the past 6 to 36 months for an acute respiratory illness that they fully recovered from and they have at least on other healthy child. They will participate in semi structured interviews and these will be analysed according to the principles of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a qualitative method commonly used in qualitative health psychology research to explore the lived experience of the person being interviewed.
REC name
West of Scotland REC 5
REC reference
15/WS/0068
Date of REC Opinion
1 Apr 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion