Research Project Summary
It also lowers patient’s stress and anxiety, improve orientation, detection, lower prevalence, and duration of delirium; enhance patients’ satisfaction and experience with care, and helps with patient’s recovery. This practice has not been universally implemented due to issues with transportation to hospital, time conflict with work, and clinicians’ fear of engaging family. The COVID-19 pandemic has created new barriers to engaging family due to limited family visitation in ICU. Mobile health (mHealth) technologies can improve and extend intervention strategies to engage families during PFCC-IR where daily patient status and care plan are discussed and finalized.
The purpose of this proposed study is to determine the feasibility of conducting a randomized controlled trial to implement and test the impact of a Nurse-Led-Technology-EnhanCed Family Engagement Program (Nurse-TECH-Family) on the primary outcome of ICU LOS, and secondary outcome of improved health among critically ill patients. It will also help with the disparities or health differences that are closely linked with social, economic, and/or environmental disadvantage such as access to healthcare especially those facing greater obstacles to health services based on their racial or ethnic group. This proposal builds on a recently completed multisite experimental study that demonstrated the benefits of family engagement during patient-and-family-centered care interdisciplinary rounds. Initial findings show that barriers for families include problems with transportation, time, and work-related issues.
Research Project Goals
The overall goal of our research study is to test the impact of NURSE-TECH-Family program during patient-and-family-centered interdisciplinary rounds (PFCC-IR) in ICU.
Research Project Objectives
Aim 1: Assess the feasibility and acceptability of NURSE-TECH-Family program and obtain data on family stress, mental and physical health symptoms, and quality of life of family members. Feasibility will be assessed using retention data, protocol completion rate, report about patient status and plan of care. Aim 2: Provide preliminary data for estimation of the effects of NURSE-TECH-Family program on family stress, mental and physical health symptoms, and quality of life at post program compared to control group who will receive the current standard care. Aim 3: Explore the effects of NURSE-TECH-Family on LOS and satisfaction based on Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores at post program compared to control group who will receive the current standard care.