Privacy, dignity and confidentiality: A time to reflect on practice

摘要

We invite you to take a moment and step back from your professional critical care gaze and try to see the reality in your own unit solely through the eyes of a visitor and without auditory cues. You might be aware that the environment has a futuristic feel and alien, with electronic appliances and screens towering over each patient. A few family members are trying to find space close to the bed of their loved one; meanwhile the bedside computer displays a range of multi-coloured patient data that is visible to family members. Switch the audio on and you will most probably experience the somewhat frightening uncoordinated and intermittent equipment warning calls that inhabit a critical care unit. Most probably, you will also be subjected and endure what at times maybe mundane conversations such as stories of a holiday trip, television drama, gossip on staff relationship or the problems of a child settling at new school. At other times, you will have no option but to listen to the deteriorating and distressing facts and figures of the patient on bed number three next to the entrance door. Welcome to the incredulous world of critical care, our workplace, often a large clinical brightly lit space divided by bed areas and fortunately less than in a typical Florence Nightingale ward.