Term Paper on "ICU Visiting Hours Open or Closed"

Term Paper 10 pages (2941 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Open vs. Closed Visiting Hours in the Intensive Care Unit

Nurses frequently find themselves in the situation where they are torn between providing the best quality care they can for a patient, and allowing family members and friend access to the patient. This can be a particularly significant problem when the patient is seriously ill, and placed in the Intensive Care Unit for whatever medical unit. Is it possible that allowing open hours access for family members to the ICU compromises the intensive care that nurses are required to provide for their patients? Is the presence of family at any hour of comfort to the patient, or does the patient find it difficult to rest and recover when family can come in at any time? This paper will attempt to review this issue from a quality care as well as a culturally competent care issue. It is my hypothesis that that open visiting hours in the Intensive Care Unit can cause more strain on the patient and the staff than is good for either to experience.

It has been repeated so often that it likely means less today than ever before, but it is true that today consumer health care dollars are more important than ever, and hospitals and HMOs find themselves competing with all measures of enticements to bring the consumer dollar to their doors. Among these upgrades include more family oriented birthing centers, cardiac rehabilitation facilities and intensive care units that offer open visiting hours. It was interesting to note in the review of data surrounding this problem the exact definition of "open visiting hours" and how this is perceived by the staff and by the healthcare consumer. This will be another of the issues I will review in this paper, since expectation and reality may sometimes diverge, and in the highly charged atmosphere of patients being cared for in Intensive Care Units, it is likely that we will find that education of patients and staff is one of the greatest tools to improved staff and patient satisfaction.

Literature Review study by Livesay, et. al, in 2004 reviewed the perception of open visiting hours in an intensive care unit which cared specifically for patients with neurological problems. The purpose of the study was simple - to determine if patient and family satisfaction could be melded with improved quality of patient care. It was also specific that the unit policy and procedures would be evaluated for needed changes as would serve customers and nursing alike. Of course, the perception of the changes on the health status of the patients was of paramount concern. In this intensive care unit under study, the policy had been to individualize visiting hours based upon patient care. One group of family members were provided with a handout which described the visiting hours as ongoing except between the hours of 0600 to 0800 and 1800 to 2000, times of shift change and staff report. In the first case, two visitors would be allowed at a time, but no children under age10. In the second the instructions were much vaguer, simply stating that the visiting hours were "flexible" and based on the needs of the patient. Primary research questions in this study included how the visiting hours would be interpreted by the staff members, and how changes in the degree of visual and auditory stimulation would affect the recovery of these neurosurgical patients. In the study each nurse and patient care assistant was asked to participate, and a total of 22 RNs and 4 PCAs did elect to. Staff members were given a survey and asked to respond anonymously within twelve hours. The study showed that ultimately there was a wide variation on the way the visiting hours were adapted, based on the understanding of the staff member. The main message gained from this study was less about clinical quality and more about consistency of message. It appeared that in this case there was a significant degree of confusion regarding the definition of "open hours" and an overwhelming majority of staff members noted they did not feel it was appropriate for a family member to be allowed to stay at bedside overnight, even though this was the policy at the time. Ultimately, the study was limited in its scope because the staff was not very clear on the very issue on which the study was based. What this study demonstrated was that the unit required a mandatory educational model to review visitation policy with staff and assist staff in a complete understanding of the flexibility that was stressed in the policy.

The next study by Fumagalli, et.al. (2005) reviewed the fact that in most observational studies (generally the majority of studies done on the subject), patients and visitors seemed to appreciate the ability to have a flexible visiting policy in intensive care. This study aimed to use a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in order to compare the complication rate which occurred in patients who had a single visitor with open privileges determined by the patient as compared to the patient who was only allowed a single visitor twice per day for a 30 minute time period. In this study, in which visiting policies were randomly changed in two months sequences for two years in a 6 bed ICU enrolled a total of 226 patients. The patients were monitored for complications, specifically microbial contamination, septic and cardiovascular complications, emotional profile and stress hormone response. It should be noted that the patients who were admitted to the ICU during the unrestricted visitor phase of this study on the whole received more and longer visits than did the others. Despite this fact, there was no more significant degree of septic complication in the unrestricted period as compared to the restricted period. Interestingly, the number of patients who had cardio circulatory complications was 2 fold higher in the restricted visitor unit and these complications were associated with a higher rate of complication in the same population. The patients who were allowed unrestricted visiting privilege also had a lower level of anxiety and lower TSH levels in the periods from admission until discharge.

Confounding and complicating factors in the study include the relative selectivity of the patients, and the fact it was a single center trial, which reduces the degree of generalization of the results.

What should be noted in the authors favor however is that the study was indeed a pilot and used more scientific methods than had previously been done to examine the true effect on the patient. What cannot be judged from this survey is what the effect of the rotating sequences had on the staff. It is noted that the staff were not allowed to know which sequence was being used until the new period began. It is also interesting to note that the ICU did not accept any new patients in the last week of the two-month period in order to prevent overlap of patients in different visiting cycles, and that the ICU was closed for 4 days between each cycle to allow a cleaning and disinfecting. This unusual procedure may have had a confounding effect on the rate of infection as well.

Farrell et. al, (2005) ran a qualitative research study in which in depth interviews were conducted with eight intensive care nurses, had limited participant observation and a review of selected documents to see how the experiences nurses were able to incorporate visitors into the potentially hectic practice of a busy intensive care unit. It is true that in many cases the staff in intensive care units see the presence of family members on an unrestricted basis an intrusion since the patients and the visitors must be managed, which created an increased staff stress in an already stressful work environment. This has been demonstrated in literature. In the study (Farrell, et.al), they used a hospital which is typical for the hospital of today in that it serves a multicultural population, and has gone through the last twenty years of health care downsizing with significant changes in patient populations, services provided by the hospital and the number and experience of nursing staff. This hospital was unique in that it was the result of the merging of two previous hospitals and there had initially been a very significant divide in which the staffs did not merge together as employees of one hospital but rather for a long period of time continued to maintain separate identities as employees of two separate institutions. To note this is significant to the study, since this element in itself could severely skew the amount of stress and distraction identified by a staff that had problems from the start. In addition, the ICU in question was one which had been developed after the downsizing of intensive and cardiac care into one unit, resulting in a reduction of bed capacity by half.

This study found that none of the participants viewed their dealings with visitors as part of a plan for their typical… READ MORE

How to Reference "ICU Visiting Hours Open or Closed" Term Paper in a Bibliography

Related Term Papers:

Open Visitation in the ICU Is it Harmful or Helpful to the Patient Research Proposal

Open Visitation in the ICU

Privileges to visit the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) have been a controversial topic since a long time. It is a simple issue between rules and… read more

Research Proposal 14 pages (4237 words) Sources: 10 Topic: Family / Dating / Marriage

---

Open Organizations Are Very Welcoming to New Essay

Open organizations are very welcoming to new employees at every level of the organizational hierarchy. In this type of employment structure, the "job makes the person" (123). Employees are capable… read more

Essay 2 pages (718 words) Sources: 3 Topic: Management / Organizations

---

Open Dialogue on Talent: The Practices Thesis

Open Dialogue on Talent: The Practices for Orienting and Socializing New Employees to the Organization

Talent Acquisition:

The recruitment of new members of an organization is essentially the first step… read more

Thesis 2 pages (505 words) Sources: 0 Style: APA Topic: Career / Labor / Human Resources

---

ICU Job Satisfaction Research Proposal

ICU Job Satisfaction

Burnout Rate as a Determinant to Job Satisfaction among Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Nurses: A Mixed Method Approach

In today's service-oriented industries, healthcare servicing is one of… read more

Research Proposal 7 pages (1933 words) Sources: 6 Topic: Nursing / Doctor / Physician

---

Visiting Lakewood Church the Place of Worship Term Paper

Visiting Lakewood Church

The place of worship that I visited was Lakewood Church. Lakewood Church is located at 3700 Southwest Freeway in Houston, Texas. Lakewood Church is a non-denominational Christian… read more

Term Paper 3 pages (1028 words) Sources: 0 Topic: Religion / God / Theology

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>