The Need for Support and Not Distress Evoking: A Meta-Synthesis of Experiences of Iranian Parents with Premature Infants

Context: Proper accountability to needs of premature infants’ parents requires recognition of these needs and how they change in different conditions.
This Meta-synthesis was conducted to understand the needs of Iranian parents with premature infants through their experiences in order to promote family-centered care.
Data Sources: The search was conducted through the Iranian database (Iran Medex, Magiran, SID) and international resources (PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar), without time limitation to April 12, 2015.
Study Selection: The inclusion criteria for this study included the qualitative studies conducted in Iran on parents with premature infants. Consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative studies (COREQ) were used to assess the quality of articles.
Data Extraction: This study is a meta-synthesis of 16 qualitative studies based on Noblit and Hare’s (1988) methodology.
The meta-synthesis presented 5 correlated metaphors derived from 13 categories and 78 integrated codes. The metaphors indicated the most important needs of parents who have premature infants for emotional, instrumental, spiritual, appraisal, informational, and communicational support. In most cases, these needs overlapped with blur boundaries. The categories included: cultural challenges of parental role, parental development versus psychological stress, psychological stress stimuli, economic challenges of parental role, physical irritation, the need for family-centered care, the need for policy making regarding the constant presence of parents in the NICU, spiritual prosperity vs. spiritual alienation, spiritual self-care vs. spiritual self-harm, guided participation in caring for the infant, the efforts to meet parental role, informational challenges of parents, and informational-communicational supports.
This Meta-synthesis provided a better understanding of the experiences of Iranian parents with premature infants and different areas of their needs. These findings could be used to design a comprehensive support system for such parents, which incorporate a holistic view of patient concerns, including religion and spirituality.