Original title: Family-centred care in adult intensive care units: A scoping review protocol of secondary evidence with a focus on the nursing role
Gabriele Alberio, Stefano Terzoni, Maura Lusignani, Alberto Lucchini +2 · September 2026
Being admitted to an adult intensive care unit disrupts life for patients and their families. To help, hospitals use family-centred care. This approach supports the needs of the whole family, not just the patient. However, the existing collection of review studies is mixed and varied. More importantly, researchers have not clearly defined the nurse's specific role in this care. To solve this, researchers designed a protocol for a scoping reviewA type of literature review that maps key concepts, evidence, and gaps on a broad topic without necessarily assessing quality., which is a study that maps out existing research. They plan to gather and review secondary evidenceEvidence from sources that summarise or synthesise primary research, such as reviews and guidelines., such as published reviews and clinical guidelines. Two reviewers will read through six major databases and grey literature, looking at works in English and Italian. They aim to build a map showing concepts, interventions, barriers, facilitators, measurement tools, and outcomes. This future map will clarify the nurse-family relationship and guide how critical care nurses practice and conduct research.
Imagine you are organising a community potluck. You ask everyone to bring a dish, but no one tells you what they are bringing. You end up with ten desserts and no main course. Here, the researchers are doing the same with existing summaries of how nurses involve families in intensive care, mapping what each summary says about the nurse's role to find where the evidence is missing.
When a loved one is in the ICU, families need support. Nurses are often the main point of contact, but how they should provide family-centred care is not well understood from existing reviews. This protocol will organise that scattered evidence, helping hospitals design better training and policies for nurses.
This protocol only includes secondary sources (reviews, guidelines, consensus statements) and excludes primary studies. It is limited to English and Italian language publications. As a protocol, it describes planned methods, not findings. The review will not produce new empirical data but will map existing syntheses, which may have their own biases. It focuses solely on adult ICUs, not paediatric or other settings.
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Family-centred care in adult intensive care units: A scoping review protocol of secondary evidence with a focus on the nursing role — Gabriele Alberio, Stefano Terzoni, Maura Lusignani et al. — MethodsX — doi:10.1016/j.mex.2026.104142
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.