Patient-family Centred Care

Abstract

We develop and test a measurement instrument to assess patient-family perceptions of services quality during a critical care service rendering. Our sample consists of patients from medical, surgical and specialty critical care units discharged from a large hospital system. We show that ‘communication and support’, ‘participation’ and ‘tangibles’ are cogent dimensions of our patient-family critical care scale that exhibits internal consistency reliability, convergent and discriminant validity. We examine the predictive validity of the measure by relating its three dimensions to perceived patient-family quality for critical care services. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the study and future research directions.