Intensive care nurses' knowledge of critical care family needs

To explore nurses' knowledge of family needs and to describe their current practices in meeting those needs.

Accurately assessing and responding to family needs of critically ill patients is significant in reducing the negative impact of stress; strengthens the ability to interact positively; increases family satisfaction with care and promotes trust and confidence. Inadequate attention to complex family needs can result in care fragmentation, family alienation, and the development of adversarial relationships between families and care givers.

A descriptive correlational quantitative design was utilised for this study, with data collected over a three-month period from nurses working within an Intensive Care Unit.

The majority of respondents (n=44) scored above 70% in their knowledge of the needs of family members, indicating an excellent knowledge of those needs but only 4.2% (n=2) were able to rank family needs in order of importance. Whilst nurses reported very good practices in relation to caring for relatives there was no significant statistical relationship found between knowledge scores and self-reported practice indicating that whilst they had the knowledge it is not necessarily translated into clinical practice. But 71.4% (n=34) of respondents claimed their knowledge came from clinical work in ICU and continuing education courses (42%).

Nurses demonstrated a very good knowledge of the needs of relatives and reported effective nursing interventions in supporting those needs, but knowledge is not necessarily translated into practice.