Survey of caregiver opinions on the practicalities of family-centred care in intensive care units.

Aims And Objectives: To determine caregiver opinion on their intensive care unit's policies with regard to visiting hours, how families are informed and participate in patient care.

Background: Benefits of improving family access to the intensive care unit, information delivery and participation of families in care have been suggested.

Design: Survey of caregivers working in French-speaking intensive care units.

A 'shock room' for early management of the acutely ill.

Our 850-bed, academic, tertiary care hospital uses a four-bed dedicated 'shock room' situated between the Departments of Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care to stabilise all acutely ill patients from outside or inside the hospital before transfer to the intensive care unit or other department. Admitted patients stay a maximum of four hours in the shock room. In this article we describe our experiences using this shock room by detailing the demographic data, including time and source of admission, diagnosis and outcome, for the 2514 patients admitted to the shock room in 2006.

Non-heart-beating donors: an inquiry to ICU nurses in a belgian university hospital.

Demand for organs for transplantation continues to be greater than supply. Non-heart-beating donation (NHBD) has been reintroduced to reverse this trend. We describe the findings of a short questionnaire that determined the attitudes and feelings of nursing staff in a department of intensive care with an established NHBD program.