[Quality and humanization of the attendance in Intensive Care Medicine. What the parents think's?]

This study aims to describe the view of family members about the quality of care given in a general intensive care unit of a university hospital.

A questionnaire to evaluate the level of satisfaction with the care was elaborated. The study included family members of patients with a length of stay more than 48h who already had visited the patient one time or more during the period. The exclusion criterion was family of admitted patients with less than 48h of ICU stay, family members who had not visited the patient at all or family members who did not desire to answer the questionnaire for any personal reason.

There were 100 relatives interviewed face to face. The most frequent complaint that had generated the greatest concern was the general status of the patient, present in 28% of the interviews. A total of 96% considered the quality of the medical team as excellent or good. However, 15% declared to be unsatisfied with the medical information given and the other 5%, although admitting satisfaction, complained about having to talk with different doctors each day.

Imperfections in the communication appears as the main predictor of unsatisfactory quality of the service in the view of the family members. Although one cannot directly compare the degree of satisfaction between distinct studies due to different methodologies, we considered that in the presented sample the recognition of the most frequent factors of dissatisfaction can point out areas for improvement in the quality of care offered in the ICU.