In-person family visits lower mental health problems among critically ill patients

Canada: ICU family visits are linked to a lower incidence of mental problems in critically sick patients for up to a year following hospital discharge, says an article published in the Chest Journal.

Inadequate family visits in the ICU can have long-term effects on patients after they are discharged. It is uncertain what influence family visiting has on the occurrence of patient mental illnesses. Stephana J. Moss performed this study to investigate the relationship between family visits in the ICU and the occurrence of mental sequelae in ICU patients 1 year following hospital release.

This study looked at a population-based retrospective cohort of adult patients admitted to the ICU between January 1, 2014, and May 30, 2017, who survived until hospital discharge with an ICU duration of stay of 3 days. Patients had to have a minimum of 5 years of administrative data before ICU admission and a minimum of 1 year of follow-up data following hospital release to be eligible. An internally verified algorithm that analyzed natural language in medical data identified whether patients had in-person family visits throughout their ICU stay. The primary outcome was the risk of developing a mental condition (composite outcome), which included depressive, anxiety, trauma- and stressor-related, drug use,  and psychotic disorders determined using administrative database classification methods.

The key findings of this study were as follow:

1. This research comprised 14,344 patients who survived hospital release with (96% [n = 13,771]) and without (4.0% [n = 573]) in-person family visits.

2. Within a year after release, more than one-third of patients were diagnosed with a mental condition (34.9%).

3. Anxiety disorders (17.5%) and depressive disorders were the most often diagnosed conditions among patients (17.2%).

4. In-person family visit was related to a decreased likelihood of receiving a diagnosis of any incident mental condition after 1 year of discharge after inverse probability weighting of 13,731 individuals (RR, 0.79).

In conclusion, critically ill patients who got in-person family visits had a lower chance of developing mental illnesses up to one year following hospital release. Given the high occurrence, family members, all patients, and primary care physicians should be made aware of the danger, and those who do not receive visits may be recognized as being at higher risk.

Reference: Moss, S. J., Rosgen, B. K., Lucini, F., Krewulak, K. D., Soo, A., Doig, C. J., Patten, S. B., Stelfox, H. T., & Fiest, K. M. (2022). Psychiatric Outcomes in ICU Patients With Family Visitation. In Chest. Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chest.2022.02.051

Keywords: psychiatry, critical care, intensive care, mental illness, depression, anxiety, stress, family visit, hospitalization, psychology, emotional support, psychiatric disorders, Chest journal, critically ill patients