Patient and family aftercare enhance interactions between Helicopter Emergency Medicine Services and former patients and families

Background: Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) in the United Kingdom (UK) deliver enhanced care to high-acuity, critically ill and injured patients. To enable patients to meet the HEMS team who treated them, many services within the UK have developed or are in the process of developing a Patient and Family Aftercare Service (PFAS). This study aims to evaluate whether the introduction of PFAS mitigates anxiety associated with patient aftercare visits.

Methods: A service evaluation of anxiety in HEMS team members before and after patient aftercare visits were conducted. The study was carried out between 1 September 2023, and 31 October 2023, and patient visits were undertaken between March 2022 and July 2023. An electronic survey was distributed to the respondents who provided informed consent for participation. The survey comprised the validated generalised anxiety disorder anxiety scale (GAD-7) and five additional contextualised statements developed through the wider PFAS. Anonymised data were collected using REDCap, a secure electronic database and was analysed in R programming. Free-text comments were reported by content analysis, placed into themes, and discussed with a narrative to complement the quantitative analysis.

Results: Of the 33 recipients, 25 completed the questionnaire. Between the pre- and post-aftercare visits, a statistically significant difference was found between scores for GAD-7 (0.004, p < 0.05) and contextualised statements (0.001, p < 0.05). In addition, six broad themes were identified through content analysis. These include the emotional impact of patient interaction, coping strategies and structural changes in the aftercare system, challenges in patient and family expectations, anxieties relating to operational commitments, memory and recall of the incident, and a positive impact on personal growth.

Conclusion: Anxiety related to patient aftercare visits was reduced when measured before and after the patient visits. Following this service evaluation, we can hypothesise that within pre-hospital care, PFAS plays an important structural role. Future research should focus on affirming the correct tool to measure anxiety in multi-disciplinary teams and prospectively evaluating these methods collaboratively across multiple pre-hospital services.