Admission to the Intensive Care Unit is a major event in patients’ life and it also has a great impact on family members. For the health care professionals, the high tech therapies and environment become ordinary, but for families this is a new and uncertain world. Communication with families is of utmost importance during the ICU stay.
Knowledge about families’ experiences is a great help for health-care professionals when working with quality improvement of care. Studies have shown that family experiences correlate with the patients’ experiences of quality of intensive care. Furthermore, studies have shown that being a family member of a seriously ill intensive care patient may lead to posttraumatic stress syndrome and depression. Care that also takes the needs of families into account is therefore very important.
The euroQ2 is short for European Quality Questionnaire and is a Danish/Dutch project aiming to develop and validate a questionnaire to evaluate families’ experiences of quality of care for seriously ill and dying patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The euroQ2 is based on two North American questionnaires: Family Satisfaction in the ICU (FS-ICU 24) and Quality of Dying and Death (QODD).
On this website you can read more about the euroQ2 project, the investigators and the questionnaire. The validation process is finished. With a proper reference the euroQ2 is available and free of charge for all to use.