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Systems and culture
Supporting family and carers of ICU survivors
Background
Intensive Care Unit (ICU) survivorship has been brought into sharp focus since the COVID-19 pandemic. Following critical illness, patients can experience clinically important physical, emotional and cognitive symptoms. These problems can have major implications for the patient and healthcare system.
Less focus has been placed on the outcomes experienced by family members and caregivers of ICU survivors. This vulnerable group often have a challenging trajectory across the critical illness care continuum and are known to experience emotional and social problems. While these problems are important and recommended to be included in studies, they are usually only partially included or not included at all. This potentially underestimates the impact of critical illness on wider social structures. The aim of this project is to define a core outcome set for critical care studies involving family members or caregivers.
Approach
This project will be conducted in two phases:
- Phase 1: A literature review of outcomes reporting from existing studies involving family members of critical care patients. Outcomes will be reported and synthesised including definition and detail of primary and secondary outcomes, measurement variables, analysis metrics, method of aggregation, time-point of measurement and classification of the outcome.
- Phase 2: The findings of the literature review (conducted in phase 1) will form the basis of a two-stage Delphi process to firstly establish stakeholder consensus on core outcomes considered priority for future research, and secondly determine outcome measurement instrument selection.
Funding and ethics
This study is funded by the Health Foundation’s grant to The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute (THIS Institute). It is independently led by THIS Institute.