The relationship between the needs and violent tendencies of critically ill relatives in the emergency department

Aim: The research was conducted in order to determine the relationship between the needs of critically ill relatives in the emergency department and their violent tendencies. Material and Method: The sample of the descriptive and relationship-seeking study consisted of 314 relatives of critically ill patients in the emergency department. The data was collected between July 2022 and April 2023 by face-to-face interview with the Personal Information Form, "Scale for Determining the Needs of Relatives of Critically Ill Patients in the Emergency Department" and "Violence Tendency Scale". In the evaluation of the data, descriptive statistics (number, percentage, mean, standard deviation, median, minimum, maximum values) are used; Student-t Test for comparisons of two groups with normal distribution, Mann Whitney U test for comparisons with non-normal distribution, Mann Whitney U test for comparisons of more than two groups with normal distribution. One-Way ANOVA was used, and Kruskal Wallis test was used for cases that did not show normal distribution. In case of differences between groups, Tukey analysis was performed to determine which group caused the difference. To evaluate the relationship between continuous variables, Pearson correlation analysis was used if the data showed normal distribution, and Spearman correlation analysis was used if the data did not show normal distribution. Results: The average age of the patient's relatives is 38.70±14.68 and 59.2% are male. It was determined that 45.2% of the patient's relatives were university graduates, 60.5% were non-smokers, and 38.3% were relatives of the patient. The average score of the patients' relatives on the Violence Tendency Scale is less than 35.02±10.43, the average score on the Scale for Determining the Needs of Relatives of Critically Ill Patients in the Emergency Department is 140.62±17.79, the average score on the sub-dimension of Communication with Family Members is 34.74±4.94, the average score on the sub-dimension of Family Members' Participation in Care in the Emergency Department. The mean score of the Organizational Comfort sub-dimension was 46.48±8.60, the mean score of the Organizational Comfort sub-dimension was 33.76±3.67, and the mean score of the Support Process of Family Members sub-dimension was 25.55±3.28. No statistically significant relationship was found between the Violence Tendency Scale and the Scale for Determining the Needs of Relatives of Critically Ill Patients in the Emergency Department (p>0.05). Conclusions: It was determined that the patient's relatives had a low tendency to violence and that there was no relationship between the needs of the patient's relatives and their tendency to violence. Keywords: Emergency department, care, the patient's relative, nursing, critically ill, violence