Assessing Family Satisfaction With Care of Critically Ill Patients: A Pilot Study

In today’s society, developing a competitive edge has become crucial for survival in any industry. In health care, patient satisfaction has become one of the most important and challenging competitive elements. Health care professionals are expected to provide both high quality of care and exceed customers’ expectations while being cost conscious and efficient. Satisfaction is typically measured by satisfaction surveys that patients complete about their recent hospital experience. However, assessing patient satisfaction in critical care environments becomes complicated. Often patients are not making decisions related to their own care because of their severity of illness and level of consciousness.¹  Patients are typically too sick to determine the level of satisfaction with care provided or may not even remember their critical care experience, which makes patient satisfaction surveys inadequate. As a result, family members are often the ones who determine satisfaction with care provided, as well as with the overall...