Tell me what you need. I hear you.

Abstract

Our Units are working well, very well. We are achieving high survival rates. The scientific-technical quality is very high. The preparation of our professionals is clearly good: advanced skills are acquired to adequately care for extremely ill patients. We face new healthcare challenges beyond the physical walls of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), seeking to ensure the early detection of critical patients1 or helping them to recover normal life, with follow-up in the post-ICU syndrome clinics.2 Furthermore, we try to improve the human aspect of our care, making our Units friendlier for patients with the intention of mitigating the hard experience of having to enter intensive care.3 We feel satisfied, very satisfied with all this, and are keen to continue advancing. It is in this context where initiatives have arisen in recent years to determine whether such advances are also accompanied by care of similar quality for the families of our patients. The critical patient must be viewed as a human being in all dimensions including social and familial. This patient-family binomium is crucial even in the ICU, and both parts of it require adequate attention. A number of measures and recommendations have been introduced in recent years referred to ‘‘care focused on the patient and family’’,4,5 precisely with the aim of also addressing the needs of the families of the critically ill.