Family Visitation in the Adult ICU

In many specialties of nursing practice, we often encourage as much family participation in patient care as possible. It is not uncommon to see family members giving baths to their loved ones or being present during patient care provided by the staff when on medical-surgical floors in a hospital. In an intensive care unit setting, this is not always the case, as some units have closed visitation and restrict family involvement in care while others have open visitation and encourage family participation whenever possible. Understandably so as the patients are critically ill and require more frequent monitoring and more intensive care in order for them to be in a stable health state. Current research on this topic is mostly focused on caregiver perspectives, both the nurse and family. Articles that were found included positive and negative feedback regarding open visitation in intensive care units and many articles stated that with enough research open visitation could become the new standard. However, there is a lack of research that includes the patient perspective regarding their family's involvement in care or simply their presence during times when staff is providing essential care. It is important to identify what the patient perspective is on open visitation in order to ensure a change in policy would be in the best interest of the patient.

Our research specifically looked at how patient health status was affected by family visitation and the impacts on safety, infection control, and exhaustion. This research allowed the team to not only conduct an extensive literature review on the topic and discover the gap in the literature regarding the patient perspectives, but additionally develop a research proposal to conduct a study to gather data on the patient perspective of open visitation. The study would be a qualitative descriptive study including a control and variable group. We focused specifically on adult intensive care units, however that does not mean similar studies cannot be done on other patient population specific intensive care units such as pediatric and neonatal. We chose a convenience sample and would conduct interviews to gather the patient perspective data.

The question that guides this investigation is: how does family participation in care in the adult intensive care unit setting affect patient perspectives of experience with care, psychological state, and overall satisfaction with care in comparison to if family involvement in patient care was restricted? It is important to consider how removing or implementing family participation in care may affect the patient as their well-being is a primary concern in the healthcare setting. Additionally, patient safety is another primary concern when discussing possible policy changes where family members who may not be licensed medical professionals could take part in care of a patient who is critically ill.