Integrating Family-Based Interventions into Emergency Departments

Abstract

The value of integrating family-based interventions into Emergency Departments (EDs) has been highlighted in extant scholarship. Literature in nursing, for example, has identified families’ psychological needs as important to consider in EDs, but no studies to-date have been conducted to examine how to best support these families. In the first study presented here, I used secondary data from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment / Kansas Division of Health Care Finance to explore (a) diagnoses that bring patients to EDs, (b) procedures that patients receive in EDs, and (c) costs associated with ED visits. In the second study, I interviewed nine healthcare providers who work in EDs or collaborate with ED providers to (a) identify the needs for mental health (MH) services, including family-based interventions, in EDs, (b) identify obstacles for offering MH services in EDs, and (c) explore solutions facilitative of the integration of MH services in EDs. The two studies are grounded in the biopsychosocial/spiritual model (BPSS) and general systems theory (GST). The BPSS model considers the multiple and interacting phenomena of physical / biological, mental / psychological, relational / social / structural, and religious / spiritual factors that patients and their families bear and experience when seeking care through emergency medicine. GST addresses the multilayered systems and contexts that patients, families, and healthcare providers navigate together, and informs the manners in which services are (or can be) most appropriately structured, accessed, and delivered.