Family Members

I have often considered family members a little bit annoying and a bit of a hindrance to a patient’s treatments. For this reason I used to feel more comfortable treating a patient when family members were not around. However, on my most recent placement in acute neurology I came to see the benefits of involving family members in a patient’s treatment and that it can actually enhance the treatment and the benefit a patient may receive from the session. For example our patient was very reluctant to turn to the left and responded a lot better to using a family member to coax her to look toward that side rather than somebody who she was unfamiliar with. The family members were also useful to prevent the patient from using her (R) UL for tasks that we wanted her to do with her left UL. As this patient often had family members around we educated them on things they can be doing to help with the patient’s recovery and to get follow-on from our treatment when we were not around. I now realise that family members can be a very useful tool for patient’s recovery if they want to be helpful and are educated on how to help out.