REVEALING THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE HOSPITAL AND LOVED ONES OF PATIENTS
While professional medical care in the hospital is of the highest importance, there are many other aspects that make out a successful and pleasant hospital stay. For this reason, we would like to take a closer look at the communication and information exchange between the hospital (doctors, nurses and healthcare workers) and the loved ones (family, friends and others caring about the patients wellbeing).
Several studies have already stated that the involvement of the family and loved ones into disease management and treatment is important and improves the quality of care. However there are no studies directed at loved ones to determine what their needs and wishes regarding the involvement into the treatment and disease management within the hospital setting are.
Especially now during the COVID-19 pandemic, the communication and information sharing between the hospital and loved ones of patients is affected through the visitation restrictions.
Our mission / your input:
Therefore, we have started this platform and the Twitter account to determine what the experience about the way and amount of information shared by the hospital with loved ones – of family, friends and others that care for the patient has been so far. This is how HospitalsTalkToLovedOnes was created. We want the needs and wishes of all loved ones to be heard, as they too are impacted by the hospital stay, even though they are not the ones seeking hospital treatment.
That is why we ask all who ever had to experience a hospital stay to let your experience be heard and tell us what matters to you when talking about the communication between the hospital and loved ones of the patient!
Open questions:
– Are loved ones satisfied with the amount of information they receive about the patient in the hospital?
– Are loved ones satisfied with how they receive the information?
– Do loved ones wish for more involvement into the developments in the hospital?
Goal:
Our goal is to determine whether the way and amount of information hospitals are sharing about the patients with their loved ones is satisfactory or whether there is room for improvement.
Future steps:
In the second step of our project, we want to determine what the needs and wishes of loved ones about the hospitals sharing information about patients with them are.
Based on the feedback we will receive from both steps, we want to develop recommendations and concepts on which data should be shared and how it should be shared between the hospital and loved ones of patients.
We will keep you updated on every step of the way on this page and on our Twitter profile.
Who are we:
We are the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Digital Health and Patient Safety and our mission is empowering patients, loved ones and healthcare professionals to improve the quality of care, increase safety and health literacy (through digitalization).