Hospice Patients' Comfort Level and Family Members' Self-Reported Satisfaction

The goal of the study was to find out whether there was a relationship between hospice patients' comfort level and family members' self-reported satisfaction. The study was conducted in a hospice care facility in the northeastern county of Maryland. Participants were family members comprised of spouses and children of the patients. All Forty-two family members who were given the survey questionnaires, completed them making the return rate 100%. Kristjason's FamCare questionnaire was used to evaluate family members' comfort level. The lowest mean was 4.44, item 4 on the questionnaire, and the highest mean was 4.95, which was item 12 on the questionnaire. The Cronbach's alpha was 0.92 which displayed high level of reliability of the FamCare scale with this sample. An acceptable Cronbach's alpha value is 0.7 (Janicak, 2017). As a result, the value of 0.92 is considerably higher than acceptable levels. The Pearson's r correlation coefficient was calculated to assess the relationship between patients' comfort level and family members' self-reported satisfaction. We used the item #1, "satisfied with the patient's pain control", as a proxy for comfort. We then took a mean of all the other items, minus item #1.The correlation between Item #1 and the mean of the other items is r = .685. The p = .025.