I end up spending more time with family than my patients. I have gotten sucked into whirlpools of family chaos at times and realized, after the fact that, as cold-hearted and awful as it may seem, someone needed to tell the family to stand back a bit and let us do what we need to do to help their loved one. Control issues are always complicated and difficult to manage. Being in an acute care setting is not the same experience as living with chronic illness. What the family thinks best, at times even the patient thinks is best, may not be in a critical care setting.
Crisis is quite different from chronic problems.
Both staff and families need to understand this and try to learn to listen to each other and not battle over control issues while attitudes and egos becomes bigger and uglier and patients generally get left-out on the sidelines without their needs being met. We may find out the medical staff are not our enemies. Being in the hospital is a nightmare in itself. Having a full-scale war makes it worse. I think it does help some.