Why Do Relatives Of Patients At The Emergency Room Get Angry? Turkey

Aim: The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine the anger states of the relatives of critically ill patients coming to emergency departments and the reasons of these anger states.
Materials and Methods: The study was conducted with 202 relatives of critically ill patients, who matched the inclusion criteria and accepted to participate in the study, at the Emergency Department of a University Hospital between September 2013 and January 2014. The “questionnaire”, which was prepared by the researcher in line with literature and involved the demographic characteristics of patient relatives and reasons of their anger at the emergency department, was used as the data collection tool.
Results: It was determined that 29.2% of patient relatives raged at the emergency department and 18.6% raged about registration procedures, 45.8% about treatment duration, 42.4% about deficiency of treatment, 13.6% about deficiency of medical staff, 3.4% about deficiency of the waiting environment, 49.2% about lack of information, 39.0% about lack of communication, 44.1% about irrelevance of medical staff, 57.6% about waiting duration and that 32.2% would have a decreased anger in case of reducing of the waiting durations.
Conclussion: As a consequence, it is thought that making the required explanations to patients/patient relatives, providing large and comfortable recreation places where they could wait, increasing the number of medical staff and approaching the patients with an empathetic attitude will increase the satisfaction of patients/patient relatives, meet their expectations, minimize the communication problems experienced and decrease the anger levels.