Abstract
Objectives: To explore, based on the existing body of literature, main characteristics of prenatal counseling for parents at risk for extreme preterm birth. Methods: A scoping review was conducted searching Embase, Medline, Web of Science, Cochrane, CINAHL, and Google Scholar. Results: 46 articles were included. 27 of them were published between 2017 and 2021. More than half of them were conducted in the United States of America. Many different study designs were represented. The following characteristics were identified: personalization, parent-physician relationships, shared decision-making, physician bias, emotions, anxiety, psychosocial factors, parental values, religion, spirituality, hope, quality of life, and uncertainty. Conclusions: Parental values are mentioned in 37 of the included articles. Besides this, uncertainty, shared decision-making, and emotions are most frequently mentioned in the literature. However, reflecting on the interrelation between all characteristics leads us to conclude that personalization is the most notable trend in prenatal counseling practices. More and more, it is valued to adjust the counseling to the parent(s). Practice implications: This scoping review emphasizes again the complexity of prenatal counseling at the limit of viability. It offers an exploration of how it is currently approached, and reflects on how future research can contribute to optimizing it.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1743-1760 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Patient Education and Counseling |
Volume | 105 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors wish to thank Maarten Engel and Elise Krabbendam from the Erasmus MC Medical Library for developing and updating the search strategies. Thanks also to Dr. Geertjan Zuijdwegt for editing this article. Furthermore, we are very thankful to the anonymous reviewers of our article; we believe that their valuable suggestions have significantly improved the quality of our manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors