Parental communication satisfaction with the clinical team in the paediatric cardiac ICU

Understanding parents' communication preferences and how parental and child characteristics impact satisfaction with communication is vital to mitigate communication challenges in the cardiac ICU. This cross-sectional survey was conducted from January 2019 to March 2020 in a paediatric cardiac ICU with parents of patients admitted for at least two weeks. Family satisfaction with communication with the medical team was measured using the Communication Assessment Tool for Team settings. Clinical characteristics were collected via Epic, Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium local entry and Society for Thoracic Surgeons Congenital Heart Surgery Databases. Associations between communication score and parental mood, stress, perceptions of clinical care, and demographic characteristics along with patient demographic and clinical characteristics were examined. Multivariable ordinal models were conducted with characteristics significant in bivariate analysis. In total, 93 parents of 84 patients (86% of approached) completed surveys. Parents were 63% female and 70% White. Seventy per cent of patients were