Family-Centered Rounds Toolkit

Family-centered rounding (FCR) is a key patient engagement strategy for hospitalized children. FCRs have become the standard of care, despite the limited evaluation of benefits or interventions to support high-quality delivery.

The FCR Toolkit was designed to increase family engagement in rounds for hospitalized children. It is intended for use by health care providers initiating FCR and/or operationalizing optimal practices in the setting of existing FCR, including: physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and quality improvement personnel.

The FCR Toolkit includes implementation materials:

• FCR checklist.
• Training curriculum for checklist users consisting of a didactic presentation, role-play simulation, and evaluation materials.
• Informational session materials for ancillary staff.
• Data collection tools to assess baseline and ongoing performance.
• A model for offering maintenance of certification (MOC) credit.

The FCR Toolkit was developed at a pediatric academic medical center with extensive input from family representatives, pediatric health care professionals at the American Family Children’s Hospital, and human factors and systems engineering researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The details of the methodology and findings for this project are available in an article, “A family-centered rounds checklist, family engagement, and patient safety: a randomized trial.” The FCR Toolkit developers provide general implementation recommendations, including practical tools and suggestion for tailoring the process for each institution.

This project was funded by an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Health Services (AHRQ) Research Dissemination and Demonstration grant, R18 HS018680 to Dr. Cox, and also supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation and the National Patient Safety Foundation through the James S. Todd Memorial Research Award. Additional support was provided by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health’s Health Innovation Program (HIP) and the Community-Academic Partnerships core of the University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (UW ICTR), grant UL1TR000427 through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of AHRQ, NIH, or other funders.

The FCR Toolkit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and exists for the benefit of the health care community. The materials are available free of charge at https://hipxchange.org/familyrounds. The FCR Toolkit can be used without permission. However, individuals are asked to register with HIPxChange prior to using the FCR Toolkit so that the developers can provide information on usage to project funders.