Purpose: The objectives of this study are to explore the importance of, social support for, and satisfaction of the needs of family members of critical pediatric patients; analyze their correlation and important relevant factors; and provide clinical recommendations to improve the quality of care.
Methods: In this study, a cross-sectional correlation design was adopted. Structured questionnaire survey and convenience sampling were used. The family members of children with illnesses treated at the pediatric intensive care unit of a medical center in southern Taiwan were recruited as the subjects. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data. The questionnaire consisted of three parts, “basic attributes of family members and characteristics of children with illnesses,” “scale for the needs of family members of critically ill children,” and “scale for the social support for family members of critically ill children.” A total of 183 valid questionnaires were collected. The SPSS windows 22.0 software package was used to input and analyze the data. Descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, Pearson product-moment correlation, and multiple linear regression analysis, etc., were used to test each study objectives.
Results: In the scores of both importance and satisfaction of “five major categories of needs” of the children’s family members, “assurance” ranked the highest and “support” ranked the lowest. The main sources of support for family members of children with illnesses were mostly family and friends. Significant positive correlation was achieved for both the overall scale and the individual scales of importance and satisfaction of needs of family members of critically ill children; the social support for family members of critically ill children was positively correlated with the degree of satisfaction of needs; social support (caregiver-message support) was the most influential in terms of predictive variables of the satisfaction of needs of family members of critically ill children.
Practical Application/Conclusion: This study confirmed that the importance of the needs of family members of critically ill children is mostly centered on the children. If the nursing staff can sort the degree of importance of the family members’ needs as proposed by our research center, apply it to data collection and care evaluation, and plan supportive care that is consistent with the family members’ needs, it will help to improve the quality of care and satisfaction of family members.