Background and objectives Including parents of preterm infants in family-centered care processes in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) requires nurses to have a basic understanding of need-based educational interventions. This paper aims to describe nurses’ subjective views of parents’ education and support needs. Method A qualitative study consisting of six semi-structured interviews was conducted to analyze the subjective perspectives of nurses providing counseling to parents with premature children. The interview material was subjected to content analysis. Results Three main themes were addressed by participating nurses: general and individual parental needs, changes in needs over time, as well as factors that facilitate or hinder nursing care needs assessments. Nurses’ assessment of parental needs is essentially based on their subjective perceptions and lacks systematic procedures. Parent counsellors assume discrepancies between their subjective needs assessment and parents’ actual needs. Participating nurses believed that the central function of their counseling work was to provide continuous, consistent, and coherent communication support to parents throughout the entire duration of their premature infants’ inpatient stay. Conclusion Integrated care concepts in the NICU must actively involve all professional stakeholders in establishing family-centered care. Apart from their subjective professional assessment, nurses should primarily rely on standardized tools to identify parental needs. Such comprehensive needs assessments can ensure a continuous, timely response to parents’ actual needs through educational interventions that offer professional, effective support for parental coping and family well-being.

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The parents needs connected with the Caring Theory of Swanson show that they mostly correspond with the dimension of “Being with”. It underlines the importance of the emotional and educational support of parents in bereavement care during the perimortal period. A major requirement here is to “get to know” the parents and their needs and to accompany them individually. Offering compassionate care and interaction between nurses and bereaved parents complys with the “doing for” and “enabling” from Swanson's model.