Search Tag: Patients
The Power of Listening: Engaging the Consumer
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
New App for Patients Who Can't Speak
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
Intensive Care Syndrome: Promoting Independence and Return to Employment (InS:PIRE)
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
Study: Measuring Respect for ICU Patients and Families
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
Shared Decision Making in the ICU - Recommendations
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
Do ICU Patient Diaries Promote Recovery?
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
ISICEM15: Setting Research Priorities with Community Involvement
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
Implementing a Diary Programme in Your ICU
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