Purpose Family-Centered Care (FCC) is a way of providing care for women and their families that serves to integrate pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and infant care into the continuum of the family life cycle. This is perceived to be a normal healthy event. Care provided is individualized and recognizes the importance of family support, participation, and choice. FCC is evidence-based and considered to be best practice. Services revolve around the needs and expectations of women and their families rather than those of the hospital staff. Benefits of FCC include: reduction of healthcare costs, improved medical and developmental outcomes, enhanced satisfaction of childbearing women, their families and the staff involved in their care. FCC is doing what is Best for mothers and babies. Providing evidence-based/best practice care creates a powerful, uniting purpose.

 Program Highlights At Miami Valley Hospital we have created a mission statement that includes guiding values and principles. This gave us direction to the development of a vision statement, which pulls our perinatal program into the future and direction to go in with FCC. We have developed a 25 member FCC committee that meets monthly. Leadership includes leader, facilitator, and consultant. There is representation from each of the perinatal areas. 4 subgroups report on their progress at each meeting. Current projects are:  A monthly summary of the percentage of eligible infants transitionalized at the mother’s bedside in L&D, distribution of a FCC newsletter on a bi-monthly basis to all perinatal staff that highlights positive efforts and achievements, transferring  mothers and infants as a couplet from L&D to postpartum (promoting non-separation). Presently, we are developing a family-centered education program to promote increased knowledge about evidence-based research and best practice. It is our goal that the staff achieves greater understanding and is able to incorporate these practices into the daily care of mothers and their families.

Outcomes  It is our plan to showcase the efforts of our FCC committee and highlight the progress that has been made in our journey to provide FCC in the organization.