Project 465426

Family engagement is a care approach where family members are considered essential and active partners in care and are provided opportunities to participate in their loved one's care. Engaging families in care has been shown to improve results for both patients and their family members in the intensive care unit (ICU). However, there are currently no scoring systems to specifically measure family engagement in the ICU. The lack of a family engagement measure has impaired the ability of researchers and health care systems to target interventions to improve family engagement. Our team developed a new method of measuring family engagement in the ICU, the FAMily Engagement (FAME) instrument. The aim of this study is to evaluate the FAME instrument in the ICUs of 4 Canadian hospitals in 3 provinces. We will include 198 family members and will ensure inclusion of females and people from racialized groups. We will also conduct an interview with 40 of the participants (10 per site) to explore their beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of family engagement in care. We will explore how family engagement is related to family-important outcomes, like mental health, care satisfaction, and experience. We will also evaluate factors, such as age, relationship to the patient, gender, and race/ethnicity that may influence engagement practice. This study will be performed in close collaboration with patient and family group partners with experience in clinical research. These partners were involved in the FAME instrument design and will be involved in efforts to increase the use of the FAME measure in future research and quality improvement.