The Family in the Intensive Care Unit: Living the Possibility of Losing a Child

Abstract

This article represents an attempt to understand the family's experience of having a child admitted to a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) and to identify the meanings that the family attributes to the experience of having a child in the PICU. The study used grounded theory as a research methodology. The data analysis gave meaning to the family's experience in the identification of the phenomenon of living with the possibility of losing a child, a phenomenon that involves family efforts to protect its members from family rupture or breakdown in the face of the life-threatening situation of the child's hospitalization. This phenomenon has relevancy in the daily practice of nursing as one explanation in understanding experiences of families in the PICU.