Quality of Communication with Parents of Critically Ill Infants

/Abstract This Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development Award (K23) is designed to prepare Katherine Guttmann, MD, MBE, Assistant Professor and Attending Physician at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) and the Mount Sinai Hospital to achieve her career goal of becoming an independent researcher focused on communication between parents of infants and providers in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) or Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). She is driven by the overarching aim of improving communication between parents of critically ill infants and clinicians to enhance decision-making and optimize outcomes for children and families. In the short term, she seeks to secure the mentorship, training, and experience to successfully compete for R01 grants designed to improve communication between parents of critically ill infants and providers in order to improve parent and patient outcomes. To achieve these goals and transition to independence, Dr. Guttmann and her mentors have developed a detailed career development plan comprised of: (1) mentorship from a team with whom she has collaborated and published impactful work; (2) advanced training in family-centered communication, outcomes research methods, and implementation science; (3) mentored leadership training, and (4) an innovative research plan to define high quality communication with parents of critically ill infants, validate a measure of communication quality for such parents, and explore the impact of poor quality communication in the ICU. Intensive Care Unit admission creates psychosocial morbidity for parents of critically ill infants. Extrapolating from studies in adult contexts, the long-term impact of poor communication in the NICU or PICU is likely lasting and negative yet the depth and breadth of the impact of communication quality on parents and infants is not known. Communication in pediatric settings serves unique functions yet it is incompletely understood and there is not a high quality validated measure of communication quality specific to critically ill infants with parents of critically ill infants; 2) evaluating the psychometric properties and validity of a communication quality measure in parents of critically ill infants; and 3) exploring the long-term impact of ICU communication on parents. The proposed K23 will address a fundamentally important gap: lack of knowledge regarding quality of communication with parents of critically ill infants and its impact on families. The findings from this work will directly inform future R01 proposals which seek to improve communication in order to improve patient and family outcomes. career development plan delineates a carefully constructed approach to acquiring the skillset, expertise, and experience needed to become an independent researcher and a leader in communication quality research. Project Number: 1K23HD117009-01A1 | Fiscal Year: 2025 | NIH Institute/Center: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) | Principal Investigator: Katherine Guttmann | Institution: ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI, NEW YORK, NY | Award Amount: $167,870 | Activity Code: K23 | Study Section: Pediatrics Study Section[CHHD-A] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/1K23HD11700901A1