Parents’ Experience and Healthcare Needs of having a Hospitalized Child with Burn Injury in Jordanian Hospitals: A Phenomenological Study Protocol

A burn injury is a traumatic experience for the affected children and their parents. During the children’s burn injury treatment and hospitalization journey, parents experience many unmet needs. However, parents’ experiences and healthcare requirements during their children’s hospitalization have not been adequately addressed in the literature, especially in Jordan.

A study is designed to gain in-depth knowledge of the parents’ experiences of children who require hospitalization for treatment of unintentional burn injuries.

A descriptive phenomenological approach will be applied. Purposive sampling will be used to select parents from one teaching hospital and one public hospital. The researcher intends to collect data from the parents throughout their hospital experience from their child’s admission until after the child is discharged. The investigation and data gathering will continue until data saturation is reached. Data will be collected in three ways: multiple face-to-face semi-structured interviews with parents, the researcher’s field notes, and the parents’ diaries. The description of the phenomena will be performed following Colaizzi’s analysis method.

The findings of this study will be an original contribution to the current literature in enhancing the understanding of pediatric burn victims’ parents’ experiences and healthcare needs during their child’s hospitalization. It is believed that the findings will help improve the quality of healthcare services provided to the parents of pediatric burn victims.

This study protocol is shared to promote research quality and transparency and to inspire interested researchers.