.jpg "Laura Smallcomb photo")
Whitney Marvin, MD
Dr.
MUSC Health of Medical University of South Carolina, United States
Disclosure information not submitted.
Title: About Me Art Boards in the PICU to Improve Family and Staff Rapport
Introduction: Admission to a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), is an incredibly stressful event for patients and their caregivers. Connecting with the care team has shown to decrease post ICU syndrome and PTSD in families and patients. We hypothesize that providing our patients and families with the ability to personalize their rooms and share information about the patient and family will contribute to a positive experience and improve the patient and their caregivers stay as well as improve family and staff rapport.
Methods: Families and care team members were assessed pre intervention with a survey that included questions about comforting the patient on a likert scale as well as details about the family dynamics. These surveys were administered via ipad on random days throughout a one month period. The caregivers were then given the “about me” posters that allows them to fill out the patients preferred name and pronouns, who their caregivers are and what they want to be called (so the team doesn’t revert to “mom” or “dad”), and other facts about how to comfort the patient.
Results: We received a total of 22 patient family surveys pre intervention. At the time of assessment, 59.1% of patients had been there for longer than 1 week. Nurses were more likely to know appropriate family titles and names vs physicians (77.3% vs 63.6%). On a scale of 1-5 (5 being highest) 81.8% of families felt that our nurses know the patient very or extremely well (4 or 5) and 100% felt that our doctors know the patient very or extremely well (4 or 5). Doctors were also perceived to know how to comfort the patient slightly better than nursing (63.7% vs 59.1%) though nurses were more likely to actually comfort the patient two times more often.
Conclusions: These innovative art boards will add to arts and medicine literature through our evaluation of caregiver and patient experience with them. We are currently collecting post intervention data. Our goal is to bring an aspect of personalization to our patient’s rooms, specifically with the objective of helping children feel more at home and increasing medical provider engagement. There has been a severe nursing shortage in our unit which we also presume could be adding to some of the lack of perceived nursing engagement in this survey.