Family involvement in patient care

[Gtikitty]

I know patient centred care has been a big thing the health care industry has been trying to really adopt. Mainly of course in terms of decision making and care planning in particular. But another thread had me thinking about how health care is utilized in North America, specifically here in Canada. There is a lot of entitlement of Canadians and what they expect (5 star service asap) compared to the newly arrived Canadians.

I work in in a busy emergency department and we often have a lot of ward patients waiting in our dept for a bed. Sometimes there really is a struggle to offer the care the patient needs when you have urgent care elsewhere that needs tending to. Priorities are always shifting.

Having a lot of new immigrants to our region I can see the cultural differences in how family members assist in taking care of their loved ones and it is something, particularly with a nursing shortage and being spread thin is highly appreciated by nursing staff. I remember in nursing school learning about Chinese culture being very proactive and hands on in the care of their loved ones and would rather have family clean and tend to their own rather than a complete stranger. We had a Chinese patient with c diff, and her daughter was at the bedside assisting her mother to the commode every 5-10 mins, which was great for us because it allowed us to focus on our other patients instead of gowning and ungowning every few minutes.

The other day I experienced a Caucasian Canadian wife of a husband ring the call bell every 30 minutes roughly to have the RN come and empty her husbands urinal (

My question to you lovely nurses is, what would you have done in this situation. Would you have done the same thing? We are so spread thin these days that i feel the days of Florence nightingale are far over. Nursing is becoming so medicalised and or our level of responsibility is ever increasing that we are unable as RNs to do the basic primary care a patient requires. Just to point out, we don't have care AIDS or LPNs where i work.