Search Tag: Families
2018 07 Nov
The patient, the whole patient and nothing but the patient. Clinical competence and limiting factors. In this short opinion piece, carer and consumer advisor Belinda MacLeod-Smith challenges us to consider crucial elements of whole patient care, and how they can be impacted by limiting factors. Caring for someone with ongoing, occasionally...Read more
2018 07 Nov
The key to caring for the whole patient. Person and family engagement (PFE) has been called the blockbuster drug of the 21st century. How can hospitals implement engagement so that patients and families are partners in patient safety? What if I told you there is a new medicine that could accelerate medical error prevention, improve...Read more
2018 19 Jun
The intensive care unit (ICU) is a rather obscure place for many people. It is a place where you are exposed to the fragility of existence, where you have to deal with the fine line between life and death. Every day I desperately try to illuminate this dark place, with a conversation, with a joke, with trying to facilitate the patients’ or families’...Read more
2018 04 Jun
I work in a small intensive care unit (ICU) where we have been writing diaries since 1992. Initially, they were just little black books with notes by staff and families on how patients were doing during their ICU stay. In 1999, we began taking photos of the patients to illustrate their critically ill period, to help them understand and see what happened....Read more
2018 16 Mar
The chaplain is a resource of ethically competent support and a compassionate caring presence for patients, families and ICU staff. An admission to the intensive care unit (ICU) is often a traumatic experience for both patients and families. Although members of the critical care team are specially trained to provide care and treatment requiring...Read more
2016 27 Sep
A New Model for ICU Rehabilitation It is now well established that many patients and caregivers suffer physical, psychological and social problems in the years and months following critical care discharge (Herridge et al. 2011). Similar to many centres, our intensive care unit (ICU) had no follow-up service available to support patients...Read more
2016 04 Aug
A team from Johns Hopkins University has developed the “ICU-RESPECT” index to evaluate patient and family experiences of respect in the intensive care unit (ICU). The questionnaire was administered to patients and families in 5 ICUs, and showed high reliability and concurrent validity in ICU patients and families. The researchers describe it as a ...Read more
2016 22 Mar
Decision-making in healthcare can range along a spectrum - from shared collaborative decision-making by the patient (or surrogate) with the doctor - to the patient asking the doctor to make the decision. Decision-making in the ICU setting is often performed by surrogates, with the attendant stress of having to make a decision for someone else and the...Read more
2015 09 Jun
Information in plain language at a confusing and stressful time can be of great help to patients and their friends and families both during and after a stay in the ICU. Here are ICU Management’s selection: My ICU care - Society for Critical Care Medicine Includes information on decision making, participating in care, what questions to ask, why...Read more
2015 18 Mar
There are two basic rules when it comes to dealing with and talking to relatives of patients in the ICU - Treat people the way you would like to be treated, and wherever possible treat people the way they wish to be treated. Stephen Warrillow (Melbourne, Australia) outlined ten rules for dealing with relatives, speaking at the International Symposium...Read more
2014 15 Oct
How much do we know about the burden for family caregivers of patients in the ICU? An intensive care unit (ICU) in Mexico surveyed family caregivers about the burden they carry with having a family member in intensive care.Dr Olivares Durán from Mexico presented the results at the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) congress this month,...Read more