A COMPARISON OF FAMILY NEEDS AND RECEIVED CARE AS PERCEIVED BY FAMILY MEMBERS OF TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY PATIENTS

Abstract

Family members of traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients have commonly experienced high level of stress and uncertainty due to the patient's condition. To alleviate stress of family members, it requires providing care to fulfill family needs. Unfortunately, nurses often rarely assess the needs of family members. As a consequence nurses rarely provide the appropriate nursing care, and as a result the family needs are unmet. A comparative descriptive design was conducted to describe the needs of family members of TBI patients and to compare the family needs and the received care as perceived by family members based upon guiding from a family stress theory of the Double ABCX Model. 119 family members of TBI patients were recruited as the sample. The questionnaires used to obtain data consisted of a socio-demographic data and the Critical Care Family Need Inventory. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the Wilcoxon signed-ranks test. The findings indicated that the assurance need category was the most important need of family members TBI patients, followed by information, comfort, proximity, and support need. The findings also indicated that there were significant differences between mean scores of family needs and mean scores of received care from nurses as perceived by family members of TBI patients. Therefore it can be recommended that nurses should improve their ability to identify and understand the needs of the family members during critical condition in hospital.