What does family involvement in care provision look like across hospital settings in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and South Korea?

J Y Park; J F Pardosi; M S Islam; T Respati; K Chowdhury; H Seale

doi:10.1186/s12913-022-08278-7

What does family involvement in care provision look like across hospital settings in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and South Korea?

BMC Health Serv Res. 2022 Jul 16;22(1):922. doi: 10.1186/s12913-022-08278-7.

Authors

J Y Park¹, J F Pardosi², M S Islam^{3

4}, T Respati⁵, K Chowdhury⁴, H Seale³

Affiliations

¹ School of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia. jiyeon.park@unsw.edu.au.
² School of Public Health & Social Work, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
³ School of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
⁴ International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Dhaka, Bangladesh.
⁵ Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Islam Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia.

Abstract

Background: Family members provide care whilst staying in the patient's room across a range of cultural settings, irrespective of resource availability in many Asian countries. This has been reported as a contributing factor to the spread of several outbreaks, including COVID-19. Despite these reports, very little is known about the risk of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) transmission related to the involvement of family and private carers in the clinical setting. As a starting point to understanding this issue, this study aimed to provide insights regarding the patient care activities undertaken by family and private carers and the guidance provided to these carers around infection control measures in hospitals located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and South Korea.

Method: A qualitative study involving 57 semi-structured interviews was undertaken in five tertiary level hospitals across the selected countries. Two groups of individuals were interviewed: (1) patients and their family carers and private carers; and (2) healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, hospital managers and staff members. Drawing upon the principles of grounded theory, an inductive approach to data analysis using thematic analysis was adopted.

Results: Five main themes were generated from the analysis of the data: (1) expectation of family carers staying with a patient; (2) residing in the patient's environment: (3) caring activities undertaken by family carers; (4) supporting and educating family carers and (5) communication around healthcare-associated infection and infection prevention and control.

Conclusion: Based on the types of activities being undertaken, coupled with the length of time family and private carers are residing within the clinical setting, coupled with an apparent lack of guidance being given around IPC, more needs to be done to ensure that these carers are not being inadvertently exposed to HAI's or other occupational risks.

Keywords: Caring culture; Family caregiver; Family involvement; Healthcare-associated infections; Hospital infections; Infection prevention and control; Patient care; Private caregivers.

MeSH terms

Bangladesh / epidemiology
COVID-19*
Caregivers
Cross Infection* / epidemiology
Cross Infection* / prevention & control
Family
Hospitals
Humans
Indonesia / epidemiology
Qualitative Research
Republic of Korea / epidemiology