The Intensive Care Unit can be a difficult experience for patients and their family members. Strive to improve your ICU’s service by implementing the Family Satisfaction with the ICU survey.

Use FS‑ICU Survey

Family Satisfaction

Around the world, Intensive care units (ICUs) strive to deliver high quality of care to patients and their families. Currently, patient satisfaction is a key performance measure for assessing the quality of health care delivered. However, in the context of critical illness, where the patient is sick and often unaware of the care episode, family satisfaction is a key performance measure for ICUs. In 1998, little research was done concerning family satisfaction with the ICU, which prompted Dr. Daren Heyland and his colleagues to develop the Family Satisfaction with the ICU questionnaire, also known as the FS-ICU.

Why measure family satisfaction with the FS-ICU? →

Print & web versions available

Use FS-ICU Survey

Collect family member feedback →

Benchmarking

If you are going to measure family satisfaction in your ICU, you may be interested in benchmarking. This allows us to provide you with a report that compares your satisfaction scores to scores of other ICUs in our dataset, to highlight your strengths and weaknesses. Benchmarking is extremely useful because it identifies the ‘best achievable’ scores on the various items and can guide your future quality improvement activities.

Learn more about benchmarking →

About the Survey

Along with updated visual aids, questions and formatting, the new FS ICU 24R can be accessed digitally. A downloadable and printable version of the survey is also available.

Learn more about the survey →

“We are accountable to the public for providing the best care possible to vulnerable, sick ICU patients. We use FS-ICU 24 in all ICUs across the province of Ontario as a means of getting feedback from families of the patients we serve to aid in our quality initiatives in our organization.”

Bernard Lawless, Critical Care Services Ontario

“Patient/Family-centered care is a key priority for our ICU. We use the FS-ICU 24 as a tool to bring the perspective of the family into our deliberations and discussions regarding our performance as an ICU. The anecdotes from families that we capture in this survey are particularly useful in highlighting things that we do well and things that need improvement.”

Dave Neilipovitz, The Ottawa Hospitals

“We use the FS-ICU 24 to demonstrate our current performance and value the bench-marked reports we receive to help us identify both our strengths and our opportunities for improvement.”

Dee Ford, ICU Director, Medical University of South Carolina

“As part of a Society of Critical Care Medicine initiative, we conducted a large-scale collaborative project in which we engaged over 50 ICUs to improve family-centered care. We used the FS-ICU 24 as one of our key outcome measures.”

Ruth Kleinpell, Former President of SCCM.