Real emotional experience of family members of patients transported within hospital in neurosurgical intensive care unit: A descriptive qualitative study.

The study included only family members from one tertiary hospital in Hubei Province, so the experiences may not represent other units or countries. The authors say family members focused more on the patient's prognosis than on the transfer topic, so some relevant transfer experiences may be missing. The paper reports 14 invitations and 12 interviews, but says data collection stopped at 10 family members and presents 10 in Table 1; it is not clear how the extra interviews were handled. It describes what families said about transport, not whether any change to communication or transfer process improved outcomes. Staff and patient perspectives were not collected, so the study cannot show what happened during transport from the clinical team's side.

Funding came from the Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Innovation Special Project. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Do not read these themes as evidence that family-centred communication or a standardised transfer process improves patient or family outcomes. The study only describes what family members said about their experiences during intra-hospital transport.