Recent studies on the attitudes of healthcare providers toward the presence of patients’ family members during cardiopulmonary resuscitations and invasive procedures (family presence) have focused on retrospective or cross-sectional surveys of staff. The research reveals that clinicians’ opinions about the value of this practice are mixed. Although guidelines have been suggested for the implementation of family presence, few reports have been published that describe actual programs or effective strategies for changing practice. As staff members who advocated initiation of a family presence program in our own emergency department, we were interested in evaluating the attitudes of staff members before the family presence program was started and after it had been established. We also wanted to see if attitudes differed between nurses and physicians. In this article, we report our experience with the implementation of a family presence program in the emergency department at a major academic teaching hospital.

Family presence...

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