Celebration in the Face of Trauma: Supporting NICU Families through Compassionate Facility Design

Abstract

For families, the modern NICU is a place of both trauma and celebration. In order to support families through these types of experiences, NICUs should be designed to encourage family reunification and presence, facilitate psychosocial support, address/minimize sensory impact, offer social connection, and enable positive framing and revisioning of NICU parental experiences. Design teams must also consider how the NICU becomes an educational space for families, and ensure that the lessons parents learn there will serve them and their children well in the future. “The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth,” – Niels Bohr.