Search Tag: Patients
2019 14 Mar
Vital minutes before unconsciousness Anaesthesia is a diverse specialty with a wide range of necessary skills, one of which is effective communication. The myth that anaesthetists pick the specialty ‘because you don’t need to talk to your patients’ persists. Whether said in jest or disdain this concept gains ground because, yes...Read more
2018 19 Nov
Noise levels in hospitals regularly exceed international recommendations, and the problem is getting worse, according to an editorial in the BMJ by a research team from King's College London and the University of the Arts London (UAL). You might also like : Music room soundproofing to reduce hospital noise Excessive noise can impact patients'...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 01 Jun
The role of the ICU social worker End-of-life issues occur frequently in the intensive care unit (ICU). The specific training and skills received by social workers provides them with the necessary tools to collaborate with the interdisciplinary team and provide holistic care to the patient and family. Research has shown that there is great variation...Read more
2018 23 Apr
Who should read You Can Stop Humming Now ? Everyone and anyone! These are the stories of what comes after the medical miracles, when the sirens and flashing lights have gone quiet, behind curtains and closed doors. In this book, you will meet those whose lives have been extended by days, months or years as a result of our treatments...Read more
2018 16 Mar
Their inability to communicate effectively whilst he had a tracheostomy on the intensive care unit (ICU), had such a profound impact on Duncan Buckley and his wife, Lisa-Marie, that they developed a concept for a novel interactive communication device, called ‘ICU CHAT’. Together, they have been embedded within the multidisciplinary ICU research...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
2017 28 May
Patient-centered care is becoming a major topic in healthcare. Many initiatives have begun focusing their care around patients and their medical conditions. This requires focusing on patient value (Porter and Teisberg 2006). When focusing on value for patients, a few challenges may arise. Firstly, the meaning of value for patients varies widely among...Read more
2017 16 Mar
Darryl O’Callaghan and Julie Vermeir are survivors of a road trauma that happened in 2010. Their article provides insight into their journey as patient and wife, and the lessons that can be learnt. Darryl’s Story There are many courageous souls who have lost their lives attempting to climb Mt Everest. Those who attempt such a climb arrive...Read more
2016 07 Nov
An app for patients who cannot communicate has been developed by Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre’s intensive care department. The app (voICe) was released in Dutch in 2013 and is now available in English. It consists of 50 pictograms, for adults and children, grouped in 6 themes, that speak and show the text. When the pictogram is touched,...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 25 Jun
Psychological and physical sequelae are common following a stay in the ICU. Intensive care diaries are one tool that is intended to improve factual memory of the intensive care stay, and improve recovery. Diaries record the patient’s stay in the ICU and outline daily activities, but there is no standard template. Previous studies have found that they...Read more
2015 20 Mar
Setting priorities for healthcare research involves a number of stakeholders, including patients and the public. Involving intensive care patients and families can be hard, but it can be done, and this was the theme of a talk by Stephen Brett (London, UK), speaking at the Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine Symposium in Brussels this week. In the...Read more
2013 15 Aug
Patients recovering from serious illness have been shown to be at risk for developing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Studies show that around 1 in 10 patients with an ICU stay of 48 hours or more develop PTSD (Jones et al. 2007). Since the 1980s, it has been known that patients don’t tend to remember much from their time in ICU and...Read more