Strategies Used by Nurses to Maintain Person–Family Communication during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic made nurse–patient–family communication more difficult, reducing the understanding of the patient’s wishes and current care history. COVID-19 challenged healthcare teams to develop strategies to address these changes and provide more integrated care using the technology at their disposal. So, this study aims to map the strategies used by nurses to maintain communication between the person hospitalized with COVID-19 and the family to understand which communication technologies were most used to maintain communication between the person and the family. Methods: A Scoping Review, according to the recommendations of the Joanna Briggs Institute [JBI] with the Preferred Reporting Items for Scoping Review extension (PRISMA-ScR), research conducted between September 2022 and January 2023. The search was conducted in the databases: Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS); Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL); Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO); Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (Medline), using the descriptors: family, communication, nurses, hospitals and COVID-19, and the Boolean operators “AND”. The inclusion criteria were: original articles, in Portuguese, English, and Spanish, published from 2020 onwards, with access to full and free text. Results: It was found that most of the communication was unstructured with the family. The technologies most used by nurses were the telephone with video calls from the patients themselves and even from health professionals to maintain communication between the patient and the family. Conclusions: Communication between patients and families became essential during the pandemic, as it became a vital lifeline of human connection that supported the mental health of patients and their families. This study was not registered.