The Effect of the Role of Intensive Care Units' Liaison Nurse on Patient Outcomes: A Systematic Review

In recent years, the role of liaison nurse in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) has been considered to develop inter-professional collaboration along with continued advanced care during the transfer of critically ill patients from ICUs to general wards. In this regard, a systematic review study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the role of the nurse liaison of ICUs on improving the outcomes of patients.

This systematic review study was conducted in 2020 by searching international scientific databases that had full coverage of nursing texts including Scopus, Pub Med, CINAHL, Science Direct, Google Scholar as well as internal scientific databases including SID and Magiran. Searching was performed by the keywords "Nurse" "Intensive Care Unit" and "Patient Outcomes" between 2005 and November 2020. The articles were critically evaluated using the Jadad tool and out of a total of 335 initially retrieved articles, 13 selected articles entered the final review stage.

The findings of 13 final articles showed that liaison nurses in ICUs have a positive effect on patient outcomes including: increasing satisfaction, reducing relocation anxiety, reducing the duration of hospitalization and readmission, reducing the incidence of side effects, and accelerating the recovery of patients. This is while they had no effect on improving the level of consciousness, laboratory parameters and some hemodynamic indicators.

Although the evidence of the present review shows a positive effect of this role on the outcomes of patients, but in some studies, these effects have not been statistically significant. To confirm the effectiveness of the role of nurse liaison in ICUs, studies with different quantitative and qualitative research approaches and larger sample sizes and different research environments are needed.