Strengths and limitations of our study
post-ICU mental distress, PTSD, polytrauma, sepsis, trauma
SEPSIS
This is the first exploratory study to evaluate barriers and opportunities for the implementation of a brief psychological intervention for post-ICU mental distress in the primary care setting. We gained some valuable insights of the patients` perspective that can be understand as a basis for further examinations.Although we tried to invite a heterogeneous sample of study participants as possible, a selection bias might be possible. Patients who take part in an evaluation study are usually convinced that the intervention was beneficial for them. It can be assumed, that those patients had a very trustful patient-physician relationship a priori. Furthermore, the GP may be better accepted for dealing with trauma in a medical context than for trauma caused by other means.In addition, the main trial was tailored for patients suffering from mild to moderate PTSD-symptoms after ICU-care and who have to be open-minded to trauma therapy and narrative exposition therapy. Consequently, it can be assumed that these patients are neither particularly very young nor very old. Since transplant patients wait a long time for their life-saving surgical intervention, these patients are often only affected by a mild to moderate PTSD burden than patients who are affected by other admission diagnoses like sepsis or polytrauma, for example.Due to our small sample size, data saturation can not be assumed. These results can hardly be transferred to other vulnerable groups such as cognitively impaired/demented patients or children and adolescents. Further studies are needed to examine the transferability of our results to other patient groups, as well as to their caregivers and relatives.