Evaluation For evaluation to be effective, there needs to be a review of the severity of illness, treatment and care received, and communication skills. Evaluation for staff and patients can produce both positive and negative aspects, the aim being to gain enrichment from the positives and to view the negatives as a learning process for change. A positive statement from one patient was, 'I was pleased to be able to look at myself from a sort of outside view and realised how much I had improved in my mental atti- tude and physical condition during and after the six months since I was in the Intensive Care Unit'. Negative comments revealed that com- munication skills were found to be, on occa- sions, pitched at the wrong level for the patients and their families, as they had obvi- ously misunderstood reasons for admission to the ICU and the degree of severity of the ill- ness. Long-term friendships can be forged between staffand families from the knowledge of what they have been through and the sup- port received at a time when they are at a low point psychologically. Follow-up care has a dis- tinct advantage in continuing this friendship and promoting a sense of identification; as one patient explained 'it's nice not just to be a num- ber'. Staff morale and job satisfaction have many variants which determine overall job satisfac- tion. Numerous studies have found that achievement of the task or success in problem- solving is an important determinant of task and work satisfaction (Turner et al 1962, Vroom 1964, Locke 1965, Herzberg 1966). One of the enriching areas of nursing is the sense of achievement in returning a patient to the level of health they perceived as being
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good. This sense of achievement can also be enhanced if there is definite feedback from some source (another person or the task itself) regarding the degree of achievement attained (Hackman & Lawler 1971).