‘It Takes a Village’: The Power of Conceptual Framing in the Participatory Redesign of Family-Centred Care in a Paediatric Intensive Care Unit

Family-centred care (FCC) is a global approach to the planning, delivery, and evaluation of safe, quality health care that is grounded in mutually-beneficial partnerships among health care providers, patients, and families. This perspective not only relates to direct care interactions, but also to quality improvement, safety initiatives, education of health professionals, research, facility design, and policy development. This chapter presents and discusses the process and outcomes of a truly collaborative and values-led participatory design quality improvement project undertaken by the QUT HEAL team at the Queensland Children’s Hospital (QCH) Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) in Brisbane, Australia in 2020–2021, to optimise family-centred care quality through a spatial redesign proposal. It discusses the importance of conceptual framing at the outset of the project to galvanise a large team of staff, current and past parents and families, and hospital administration to support the three core principles of FCC—partnership, participation, and protection, and promote the health and well-being of individuals and families both through the design process and in the final conceptual interior design outcome.