Families in Hospitals - Essay Example

The family is one of society’s cornerstones. It is the place we learn, we love, and that defines us. It has many roles, but among its more important roles is in promoting and reinforcing the health of its members. Parents teach their children to eat well, exercise, and stay healthy. But education is only part of it. When a member is ill, families can be extremely important in supporting that member and helping them to get better. It is very important for nurses to recognize the contribution families can make to a patient’s improved health as it is their responsibility to coordinate family visits and communicate the patient’s status to the family. In this essay, I will examine how families promote the health of their members and how nurses can use families to help improve the health of hospital-bound patients.

Family can have many definitions but it usually refers to immediate relations such as a mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, or child. All of the individuals through their love of one another can provide maximum support and encouragement to a patient. They can also provide a standard of care that it may not be possible for even the most well-trained nurse to provide. Because of this important fact and because of the role of nurses in coordinating a patient’s care, it is important for nurses to communicate clearly and compassionately to family members. But there is more a nurse can do. Nurses can actually train family members to provide basic care to patients and to provide help to nursing staff at difficult times. Although a nurse will have the final responsibility for the care a patient gets from the hospital—and it is important for nurses to stay at the center of this web—by communicating and “deputizing” family members, nurses can maximize the quality of care a patient receives. While doing this, it is important to always keep the patient’s best interests at heart. Although the majority of family members are caring and have good intentions towards their relations it is also possible some family members may increase a patient’s stress levels or be generally detrimental to a patient’s health. This is surely one of the most difficult situations for a nurse: deciding who can and can’t see a patient. Although some family members will claim unlimited access to a patient, nurses must decide what is appropriate and what is not.

But what is important to remember is that the family can be very helpful in improving the comfort and health of a patient. Studies show that families are looking for direction and want to be helpful.

They perceived nurses as providers of technical care and they perceived themselves as having an important role in providing social and emotional care. Families trusted the clinical judgment of the staff but the staff were reluctant to trust family carers, especially in situations where care involved an element of risk. Family roles were limited by members' own ability to care and the dependency of the resident, while professional responsibility and accountability discouraged nurses from sharing some caring roles. The results indicate that families in this study were more willing to help in nursing home care and were perhaps undervalued as a resource within the nursing home setting.

Nurses can use family members to help patients in the hospital, it is true, but they also have an important responsibility in teaching families how to care for sick relatives at home, after they have left the hospital. Care must continue at home too and unless the nurse is providing round-the-clock care in a private capacity, family members are going to have to help out. Nurses must prepare families not only mentally, but must actually teach family members how to bathe sick individuals, how to dress them, and how to feed them, including what sorts of food they should eat. It is clearly an extremely complicated responsibility.

Many of these ideas can be found in the work of Hildegard Peplau, the famous nursing theorist who stressed the importance of the nurse-patient relationship. Really bringing the family into this equation is an extension of this original relationship and flows out of it. As she writes in her most famous book, a patient needs to be understood by a nurse, and the patient and his or her family must be oriented to the health problem but also to the procedures. Reaching out to the family can help focus both the patient and his or her family:

As the home and hospital situations merge into one concept that pulls together, taking the patient in the direction of a solution to his difficulty, the patient can become better able to focalize on the tasks to be accomplished. This outcome cannot occur at once but takes time and demonstrated interest on the part of hospital personnel. It requires cooperation with the family.

The role of the family in the care and curing of a patient cannot be overemphasized. The family is such a central location in so many of our lives that we must continually evaluate how best to bring them into the caring situation. The nurse's role is to make both patient and family feel comfortable, set limits, and teach them how to help.