Effects of AIDET Communication of Registered Nurses on Family Responses at Emergency Department

Abstract

Families are highly stressed, anxious, and fearful when faced with the life-threatening conditions of critically ill patients in emergency care and even higher during waiting for confronting with uncertainty situations of patients’ critical illness. Communication skills are a core competency for registered nurses to provide care and support to patients’ families. This quasi-experimental study aimed to compare the critically ill patient’s family response scores received from the nurses, in the experimental group, that communicated based on the Acknowledge, Introduce, Duration, Explanation, and Thank you’s (AIDET) paradigm; and based on normal communication paradigm. The sample consisted of 160 patients’ families who accompanied the patient and agreed to participate. They were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups by triage nurses, sorted by severity according to the normal service system. A questionnaire was used to assess family responses and was developed from the reviewed literature. The content validity index was .96 and the reliability with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was .98. Data were analyzed using independent samples t-test to compare differences in family responses’ scores.
The results showed that the overall average score regarding the family responses from nurses AIDET communication in the experimental group was significantly higher than in the control group (t = 21.96, p < 0.001). The study's findings suggested that the AIDET communication framework could be applied for nurses in the Emergency Department to appropriately communicate in supporting the patient families’ responses in critical events and to improve the satisfaction of emergency department services.