Designing a Visiting Policy Based on the Challenges of the Coronary Care Unit: An Interactive Approach

One of the psychological stressors for the patients admitted to the coronary care units (CCUs) is being away from family members and lack of visiting time. Also, one of the special needs of families is to visit patients during their hospitalization period. In order to enforce visiting rules in CCUs, it is important to take the needs of all staff, patients, andvisitors into consideration, and a visiting policy should be adopted that ensures the most effective visiting system.

The present study aimed to design a visiting policy based on the challenges of the CCU ward using an interactive approach.

This qualitative research was conducted with a participatory action research (PAR) approach in 2016 at Ganjavian Hospital, Dezful, Iran. Content analysis was performed based on the method proposed by Graneheim and Lundman (2004). Forty stakeholder participants were included in focus groups consisting of 3 to 7 people using a purposeful sampling method.

In order to determine the current situation, after analyzing the extracted codes in the focus groups and according to the similarities and conceptual content, 36 subcategories, 11 categories, and 3 subthemes, including improper physical factors, problems related to human factors, and improper policy quality, were obtained. After determining the current status of the visiting policy and problems, the new policy was developed by the planning group consisting of a representative from each of the focus groups.

In the new visiting policy, efforts have been made to improve the quality of visiting by providing more opportunities for patient-companion and doctor-companion visiting, focusing on ensuring complete and timely information, assigning rooms for doctor-companion and patient-companion visiting, and paying attention to the required equipment. This program can be used by other planners while adjusting its items according to their conditions.