With greater frequency, critical care health professionals are evaluating the role of family of ICU patients in the recovery of critically ill individuals. As such, support and communication with family is becoming a priority that is just as important as the work being done in an ICU to deal with the patient's health problems through treatment.
One important role that family members provide during the critical hours in treating an ICU patient is in providing information and assisting with communication with a seriously ill patient. If the ICU patient cannot communicate directly due to the serious nature of his or her condition, family members must provide the necessary information that doctors and nurses in ICU must have to stabilize the patient's health situation. A productive and interactive relationship should be established early between family members and the key health professionals who will make the decisions about what is to be done to treat a critically ill or injured patient.
Three aspects of the relationship between critical care providers and family members have surfaced as crucial parts of the treatment plan. Those aspects are collaboration, respect, and support. By considering the family members as key parts of the team working with critical care doctors and nurses, health professionals provide an emotional link to patients that can make the difference in recovery of that patient.
Supporting family members who are also in a distressed state makes them capable of providing emotional and spiritual support to a critically ill patient. That emotional support can be the key that will determine if a patient will survive their stay in ICU or succumb to a critical illness or injury. Critical care doctors and nurses who take advantage of the resource of a patient's family will see results in terms of the patient's resilience and recovery from his or her medical problem.
When family members of critical care patients are interviewed, an important need they express is for communication of reliable information about the status of their loved one. Critical care providers become so focused on the care of the patient that they often do not recognize the level of distress that family members waiting nearby are going through.
By bringing family members into the process of helping their loved one recover from a critical health emergency, doctors and nurses provide important support for those family members and for their patients at the same time. This approach to critical care treatment has proven time and time again to be highly successful in helping critically ill patients recover and then go on to full recovery once they are released from the hospital and recuperate at home.
http://ajcc.aacnjournals.org/cgi/content/full/18/6/543
http://ajrccm.atsjournals.org/cgi/content/full/163/1/135
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