In late spring I received an e-mail from a group of French neurosurgical intensive care nurses with an attachment of their children’s information booklet. The story of this information leaflet was as follows: they had read one of my research articles about children and young people visiting intensive care units*, got together in a working group and developed an information resource for their young visitors and won a prize with it.   The prize included some travel money and so they contacted me asking if they could visit.

Naturally Nursing Studies said ‘yes’ and in June (16 – 19.06.2015) Aline, William, Emmanuelle and Solene came over from Rouen, some 2 hours from Paris, and met with Sheila, Tina, Corrienne, myself and some colleagues from ICU practice.

Tina (Lauterbach), an MSc student and paediatric intensive care nurse, welcomed our visitors and took advantage of the good weather with some relaxing time sitting outside! On the 17th we went to the Western General Hospital visiting their ICU and meeting Morag Doig and Kim Lumsden. This ICU has a very interesting and successful family bereavement programme developed by an interdisciplinary group which includes Morag and Kim. There was a lot of discussion and exchanges and it is fair to say that both sides went away with many new ideas. We also had the opportunity to go to one of the high dependency units (ward 58) and met with Lillian Weir, Charge Nurse, for some discussions.

On the 18th we travelled across town to the New Royal Infirmary to meet with Corrienne McCulloch. Corrienne is a PhD student who is researching diaries in intensive care. As it turned out, Aline is also part of a working group looking into ICU diaries. This again triggered interesting discussions and international comparisons on how diaries are used.

On both days our French colleagues had the opportunity to see the ICUs. One of the differences that was observed was the unit layout with ‘the continent’ preferring single or double bedrooms whilst ICUs in Britain are often more open spaces. Another difference that was discussed on both days was staffing. In the UK, one ventilated patients is usually looked after by one bedside nurse. In France, one ICU nurse looks after three patients, and these can be three ventilated patients.

There was also time left to explore Edinburgh and Scottish cuisine!

It was a real pleasure having Aline, William, Emmanuelle and Solene visit us and there were some good discussions on international intensive care nursing and how we can improve care for our patients and their families!

Susanne Kean

* Kean, S (2010) Children and young people visiting an adult intensive care unit. Journal of Advanced Nursing 66 (4), 868 – 877.

Aline and her colleagues brought a translated version of their information booklet with them. If you are interested in this, please contact me for a copy. (Susanne.kean@ed.ac.uk)

Intensive care researchers are visited by French Neurosurgical Intensive Care Nurses in June / Nursing Blog by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

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