RECORDED conversations with families of patients on ventilation in intensive-care units are helping medical staff in a hospital in the United States connect with their patients and provide more personal treatment.
A lay chaplain at John Hopkins Hospital, in Maryland, Elizabeth Tracey, says that the project emerged from conversations with doctors and nurses treating Covid-19 patients who were intubated and unable to speak. As no relatives were present, staff were unable to gain any insights into the patients, and felt disconnected from them, which made it harder to make decisions about their care.
She said that one staff member told her: “All of my patients are intubated, sedated, and often prone, and there’s no family telling me their story. I have no idea who they are.”
Ms Tracey began contacting the relatives and loved ones of patients who were sedated and on ventilation, and recording conversations with them, which were then edited down to about two minutes for clinical staff to listen in.
Conversations often begin with talking about pets, but go on to cover hobbies, personality traits, favourite foods, and relationships. Relatives are also asked what they would like to say to the patient.
The audio file is then kept with the patient’s electronic record; so any member of the patient’s care team can listen to it.
A former broadcast journalist, Ms Tracey told the Episcopal News Service: “Audio files work really well because the clinician can multitask while listening. They can chart, for example, while they hear the patient’s story. Clinicians are already deluged with text-based material.”
Nurses and doctors have told her that they feel more connected to their patients after listening to the clips.
The project, This Is My Story (TIMS), has developed, and is now being used in other hospital departments, and is also available in languages other than English. The interviews are recorded by chaplains, and medical students help to edit them.
Even though visitor restrictions have been eased in hospitals, the recordings are continuing, Ms Tracey said. “Visitor restrictions are relaxed a bit, relative to how they were when we had a lot of acute Covid in the hospital, but TIMS is still very useful even when loved ones are present. They don’t want to be telling the patient’s story again and again, and the hospital operates 24/7; so other shifts also get a chance to learn about the patient.”
She said that the project had helped to ensure that the human connection between patient and doctor was not lost during the pandemic.
