Thursday 05 / November / 2026
Muscat: The Patient and Family Experience in Neonatal Care Conference recommended, at the conclusion of its proceedings on Thursday, developing an integrated healthcare system centered on patient and family needs, expanding parental involvement in treatment decisions and care plans, institutionalising compassionate communication, developing professional competencies, and deploying modern technologies and artificial intelligence to improve the quality and continuity of health services.
The conference—held under the slogan "From the Very First Moment, the Care Experience Begins"—emphasised the importance of integrating family-centered care into the core practices of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), ensuring parents participate in clinical rounds and treatment decisions, and reinforcing their role as essential partners in the care journey.
It recommended updating mechanisms for recruiting and evaluating healthcare staff, including skills in empathy, emotional intelligence, and effective communication within professional competency standards, alongside implementing continuous training programmes in therapeutic communication and delivering difficult news, as well as developing specialised skills in developmental care for newborns.
The recommendations stressed the importance of developing governance for responding to family feedback by establishing institutional mechanisms to follow up on feedback, assigning responsibilities for addressing it, and informing families of improvements implemented in response to their inputs, in addition to adapting patient experience measures to suit the local environment and studying the establishment of a national observatory to monitor patient experience indicators and develop health practices. It called for deploying artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to redesign health processes and reduce wait times, as well as developing performance indicators measuring the level of family engagement, clarity of communication, psychological safety, discharge readiness, and the quality of provided support services.
In the field of continuity of care, the conference recommended ensuring families are discharged from the hospital according to clear care plans that include direct communication channels to answer their inquiries, and expanding home care services and telemedicine consultations to provide necessary support post-discharge and reduce the need to revisit health institutions.
The recommendations affirmed the importance of forming multidisciplinary care teams comprising medical, nursing, psychological, and social personnel, providing psychological and social support services for families and healthcare workers, improving the work environment, strengthening psychological and professional safety for personnel, and exchanging successful experiences and practices among health institutions and governorates.
The conference aimed to consolidate the concept of family-centered care, involve parents in decision-making and building care plans, leverage family experiences and convert them into improvement opportunities by utilising measurement, data, and modern technologies, and exchange expertise and practices among health institutions, thereby contributing to providing more humane and high-quality care, consistent with the targets of "Oman Vision 2040." The conference witnessed panel sessions addressing several themes related to the family experience in neonatal care, while its scientific program included lectures, panel discussions, and reviews of family experiences, with the participation of speakers from the Sultanate of Oman and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The second and final day's programme discussed topics related to establishing the patient experience in Omani hospitals, clinical governance, the hidden emotional burden on families, therapeutic communication, and the transformation toward a patient-centered healthcare environment.
