Family Member Experiences in Intensive Care Units Care: Insights From a Family Involvement Tool Implementation Trial.

Family involvement is widely considered an important part of patient care in the intensive care unit. From professional health care organizations, government, and hospital associations, there has been a cultural shift toward family presence as part of a wider commitment to patient-centered care. At the same time, the meaning and impact of family involvement in the intensive care unit setting remain opaque and under-studied. This study employed an ethnographic approach to better understand family involvement in practice and from the perspective of health care professionals and family members by studying an implementation trial of a family involvement tool in two intensive care units over 2 years. The findings revealed that an expanded and self-defined role for family members as carers in the intensive care unit challenged the current configuration of the nurse patient/family relationship and that family members were aware of these dynamics. While the intensive care unit implementation teams were both motivated to implement a novel way of facilitating family involvement, the processual, organizational, and contextual factors in the intensive care units largely determined the possibilities of its application. This suggests that interventions should address the specific context in which they are employed.

Beyond the Team: Understanding Interprofessional Work in Two North American ICUs.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the ways in which healthcare professionals work together in the ICU setting, through a consideration of the contextual, organizational, processual, and relational factors that impact their interprofessional collaboration. DESIGN: Data from over 350 hours of ethnographic observation and 35 semistructured interviews with clinicians in two ICUs were collected by two medical anthropologists over a period of 6 months. SETTING: Medical surgical ICUs in two urban research hospitals in Canada and the United States. MAIN RESULTS: Although the concept of teamwork is often central to interventions to improve patient safety in the ICU, our observations suggest that this concept does not fully describe how interprofessional work actually occurs in this setting. With the exception of crisis situations, most interprofessional interactions in the two ICUs we studied could be better described as forms of interprofessional work other than teamwork, which include collaboration, coordination, and networking. CONCLUSIONS: A singular notion of team is too reductive to account for the ways in which work happens in the ICU and therefore cannot be taken for granted in quality improvement initiatives or among healthcare professionals in this setting. Adapting interventions to the complex nature of interprofessional work and each ICUs unique local context is an important and necessary step to ensure the delivery of safe and effective patient care.

How Surgeons Think to Avoid Error: A Case Study of the Neurovascular Bundle Sparing During a Robotic Prostatectomy.

OBJECTIVE: To illustrate how experts efficiently navigate a "slowing down moment" to obtain optimal surgical outcomes using the neurovascular bundle sparing during a robotic prostatectomy as a case study. DESIGN: A series of semistructured interviews with four expert uro-oncologists were completed using a cognitive task analysis methodology. Cognitive task analysis, CTA, refers to the interview and extraction of a general body of knowledge. Each interview participant completed four 1 to 2-hour semistructured CTA interviews. The interview data were then deconstructed, coded, and analyzed using a grounded theory analysis to produce a CTA-grid for a robotic prostatectomy for each surgeon, with headings of: surgical steps, simplification maneuvers, visual cues, error/complication recognition, and error/complication management and avoidance. SETTING: The study took place at an academic teaching hospital located in an urban center in Canada. PARTICIPANTS: Four expert uro-oncologists participated in the study. RESULTS: Visual cues, landmarks, common pitfalls, and technique were identified as the 4 key components of the decision-making happening during a slowing down moment in the neurovascular bundle sparing during a robotic prostatectomy. CONCLUSION: The data obtained from the CTA is novel information identifying patterns and cues that expert surgeons use to inform their surgical decision-making and avoid errors. This decision-making knowledge of visual cues, landmarks, common pitfalls and techniques is also generalizable for other surgical subspecialties. Surgeon educators, surgical teaching programs and trainees looking to improve their decision-making skills could use these components to guide their educational strategies.

Defining and Redefining Family Involvement in Practice: An Implementation Trial of a Locally Adaptable Patient-Centered Professional Development Tool in Two Ontario Intensive Care Units.

ABSTRACT: Research on best practices for family member involvement has shown that such involvement improves care quality in critical care settings and helps to reduce medical errors leading to adverse events. Although many critical care units promote the principle of "patient-centered care" and family member involvement, there can be a significant gap between knowledge about these processes and their translation into practice. This article is based on an implementation trial of a patient and family involvement knowledge-based tool that involves an educational component for frontline health care workers. By combining ethnographic observation, semistructured interviews, focus groups, and document analysis, we were able to not only examine health care provider views on family involvement but also explore the areas of tension that arose in practice because the introduction of the family involvement tool exposed local factors that shaped the conditions of possibility of family involvement. In particular, unspoken preferences, assumptions, and concerns about family involvement were brought to the fore because this intervention disrupted well-entrenched power dynamics related to family involvement and professional boundaries. Through this ethnographic research, we found that the concept of patient-centered care is not uncontroversial among health care providers and that the form of its practice was largely up for individual interpretation. Interventions and policies that aim to promote patient-centered and family-centered care would benefit from addressing the ways in which these ideas affect the work of different health care professionals and incorporating nursing concerns around family involvement.

A nursing perspective of interprofessional work in critical care: Findings from a secondary analysis.

PURPOSE: This article presents a secondary analysis of nurse interviews from a 2-year comparative ethnographic study exploring cultures of collaboration across intensive care units (ICU). Critically ill patients rely on their interprofessional health care team to communicate and problem-solve quickly to give patients the best outcome available. Critical care nurses function at the hub of patient care giving them a distinct perspective of how interprofessional interactions impact collaborative practice. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Secondary analysis of a subset of primary qualitative data is appropriate when analysis extends rather than exceeds the primary study aim. Primary ethnographic data included 178 semistructured interviews of ICU professionals from 8 medical-surgical ICUs in North America; purposeful maximum variation sampling was used to represent each profession accurately. Fifteen anonymized ICU nurse interview transcripts were coded iteratively to identify emerging themes impacting interprofessional collaborative practice. RESULTS: Findings suggest that quality of interprofessional collaboration is a product of a multitude of factors occurring at multiple levels within the organization. Managerial and organizational factors related to ICU nurse training and staffing may impede development of nurses' interprofessional skills. CONCLUSION: Deliberative development of ICU nurses' interprofessional skills is essential if nursing is to move from primary coordinator to active collaborator in patient management.