Social Isolation - Restricted Mobility and Noise Nursing Assignment

Introduction

Nurses who are working in critical care unit can experiences traumatic event when supporting families after losing their loved one. The environment of the critical care unit expose nurses to death and dying repeatedly whether the patients are actively dying or face inevitable death. Thus, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurses can encounter challenges to cope with the stress that results of supporting dying patients or their families ( Naidoo and Sibiya, 2014).

Critical care unit

With the advancement in technology, Naidoo and Sibiya (2014) point out that the ICU should be entirely and entirely dedicated towards life-saving through the provision of specialized surgical and disease management to numerous patients. Wenham and Pittard (2009)  confirm that the ICU is a potentially hostile environment for critically ill persons. The resulting environment is associated with adverse conditions that contribute to the increase in patient delirium. According to Wenham and Pittard (2009), delirium is responsible for a prolonged stay in hospital and elevated mortality levels. In most of the ICUs, the most common causes of increased delirium levels are ambient light, social isolation, restricted mobility, and noise. Wenham and Pittard (2009) recommend that the ICU environment needs improvement through critical staff education, equipment modification, and careful consideration of the future design for ICU. Alameddine et al. (2009) suggest that improvement of the ICU should focus on strategies to enhance patient care, recruitment, and retention of a competent workforce. These strategies should seek to improve experiences in the professional, physical, and emotional environments. An example of an ICU patient case is non-occlusive mesenteric ischemia. According to Cocorullo et al. (2017), acute mesenteric ischemia is a rare condition associated with high mortality. In all hospital admissions in the US and UK, the disease accounts for 1:1000, with a mortality range of 50-69%. For the ICU nurses, the disease presents diagnostic issues owing to its lack of specific exact radiological CT features (Cocorullo et al., 2017).

Numerous dimensions of care are involved in the care environment. The environment also comprises sets of elements integrating it, and one has to account for all parts, in a manner identical to the way parts associate with a whole. According to Backes (2015), there is no consideration of critical parts in the biomedical health care model. The biomedical health care model pays attention to the disease, knowledge fragmentation, being and acting professionally that at times, not even the being cared for, is perceived as an integrated whole. The integrated-whole has numerous social relationships, potentiated by social and natural environments (Backes, 2015).