SICQ coping and the health-related quality of life and recovery of critically ill ICU patients: a prospective cohort study

Abstract

Patients treated in an ICU commonly experience psychological distress for a number of reasons, including discomfort due to invasive medical treatments, the unfamiliar environment, and intrusive thoughts about mortality.As a result of this distress, patients may report decreased health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and impaired recovery during the ICU stay and after discharge.Adaptive coping helps in decreasing psychological distress, and in general and patient populations adaptive coping positively affects mental health and HRQoL. Accordingly, researchers have begun to address the coping styles of ICU survivors,family members of ICU patients, ICU staff members, and hospitalized ICU patients. However, research in this area is still underdeveloped. The Sickness Insight in Coping Questionnaire (SICQ) is an instrument that measures coping styles of particular relevance to the experience of serious illness during and after hospitalization, including positivism (ie, having a positive attitude), redefinition (ie, seeing advantages of the medical situation such as personal growth), toughness, fighting spirit, and nonacceptance (of the current medical condition and its possible outcome). A previous SICQ study has focused on its measurement properties and found good structural validity, good patient-proxy agreement, and high reliability of its subscales. However, whether SICQ-measured coping styles are associated with ICU patients’ HRQoL and recovery remains unclear. Therefore, the aim of the current research was to examine whether the patient-reported SICQ-assessed (ie, assessment pre-ICU and after discharge) coping scores of severely ill patients relate to HRQoL and recovery As a supplementary analysis, whether the pre-ICU proxy-reported SICQ-assessed coping of critically ill patients had a role in the patientreported HRQoL and recovery was examined.