Background: The needs of intensive care patient’s family members are often neglected. Many healthcare practitioners do not realize that meeting the family needs in the intensive care settings actually may improve outcome for their patients and enable the family members to cope and deal with the patient’s hospitalization period effectively. With this in mind, the present study aimed to address the needs of Malaysian family members of intensive care unit patients. Methods: This cross-sectional survey was conducted among family members of Intensive Care Unit of Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia. A total of 60 family members were recruited using a convenience sampling manner. A Malay validated Critical Care Family Needs Inventory was used to identify the family needs among the respondents. Descriptive statistics as well as mean comparison analyses were employed to achieve the study. Results: The findings showed that family members ranked Assurance items as the most important needs. In terms of subscales scores, Assurance and Information evidenced higher mean scores compared to other dimensions. All the family need dimensions had positive and significant associations with one another. The highest correlation was noted among Comfort – Support pair, r(58) = 0.73, p < 0.001. No significant differences in the mean values found across gender, history of admission and types of relationships. In contrast, significant mean difference was observed across level of education. Conclusion: Identifying the needs of family members in the intensive care unit is imperative as it raises awareness and contributes knowledge in terms of family needs to healthcare providers, policy makers, medical social workers and general public.
Critical Care

Introduction: Doctors play an important role to assess and manage pain. Failing to do so properly, pain will affect the quality of life and increase the length of hospital stay for patients. In Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, pain assessment and management programs have been conducted on a regular basis. However, there has been no studies to assess the effectiveness of these programs. Methodology: This is a cross-sectional study to assess the knowledge and attitude on pain assessment and management among medical officers at QEH. A universal sampling technique was used, to represent medical officers from major clinical departments. The Knowledge and Attitudes Survey Regarding Pain (KASRP) questionnaire was used for this study. Results: A total of 278 questionnaires were distributed to medical officers. The study sample consisted of 125 females (44.9%), and 153 males (55.1%). The age group of the participants ranged from 25 to 41 years old. A 116 respondents scored less than 60% on the knowledge of pain (41.7%). These findings show there was a deficit in their knowledge and attitude about pain. There was also a difference of scores between genders, where the male doctors performed better than the female doctors. There was a difference between scores among doctors from different departments. The highest mean score was from the department of Anaesthesia (80.2%). There was also a difference regarding pain knowledge based on the years of working as a doctor, where the highest passing rate was from doctors working for more than five years. Conclusion: This study demonstrated that there is a lack of knowledge and attitude on pain assessment and management among QEH medical officers who responded to this study. This will support the plan on a more aggressive and continuous education programme to improve pain assessment and management among doctors in QEH.

Introduction: Patients admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) experience intense physical stress. Family members of these patients also experience stress during the admission. Therefore, it is an important task of the ICU staff to provide the family members with appropriate and clear information. There are many methods to do this. This study aimed to compare the impact of two methods of information sharing on the satisfaction levels among families of ICU patients. The novel method being introduced and investigated was a locally designed information leaflet in combination with verbal explanation. This new method was compared with the traditional method of verbal explanation only. Methods: This was a randomized controlled study, conducted at the ICU of Teluk Intan Hospital. A total of 60 participants were enrolled, with 30 participants each in the intervention and control group. The Malay version of the Validated Critical Care Family Satisfaction Survey (CCFSS) was used to measure family satisfaction with the care received during their ICU admission. Results: The intervention group reported significantly higher level of satisfaction in all of the components (Assurance, Proximity, Information, Support and Comfort). Upon further examination of the results of the intervention group, the scores in the Assurance, Proximity and Comfort component were significantly higher compared to the scores in the Information and Support component. Conclusion: Integrating an information leaflet with the traditional verbal method of delivering information has proven to provide a significant difference in satisfaction levels to the family members of patients who were admitted to the ICU.