Family participation in resource-limited hospital care to enhance care, support family caregiver and tackle health worker shortages.

Objective
Our objective is to design, validate and implement family participation interventions in hospital care that enhance patient outcomes, reduce family caregiver burden, alleviate health worker workload and contribute to building more sustainable health systems.

Expected outcomes
The expected outcomes of the family participation intervention are:

1. Patient: Enhance patient outcomes; for example, medication adherence or improved detection of early warning signs.
2. Family caregiver: Reduce the burden of care by recognising, training and supporting care participation in hospital care and preparing caregivers for care at home.
3. Health worker: Reduce the workload by providing family caregiver training tools to decrease one-on-one explaining, questions and interruptions from caregivers, and shifting task load to more coordinating responsibilities. 
4. Health system: Improve sustainability by improving cost-effectiveness of care while improving outcomes for patients, caregivers and health workers.

The expected outcomes of the research are:

1. Interventions: Develop a set of validated and co-created interventions.
2. Methods: Develop methods for assessing family participation needs, co-creating context-specific interventions and integrating them in standard care.
3. Policy: Proof of concept to push policy to adopt family participation interventions.
4. Community: Build an interdisciplinary research community with local and international expertise around a new field of research.
5. Exchange: Learn from each other’s family participation practices across different settings in Ghana, Bangladesh, the Netherlands and beyond.