The experience of acute clinical deterioration is unique, extensive and complex as well as being a difficult experience for all involved. It is well documented that the benefits of improving a patients' experience include increased satisfaction, reduced length of stay, improved patient outcomes and reduction of costs.
Patient experience is recognised as a means of assessing healthcare delivery with organisations in many countries now gathering patient experience or satisfaction data. This result indicates the need of ICU follow-up clinics. This study shows that critically ill patients were affected by cognitive disturbances and/or disturbed memory before their arrival at the ICU. The stability of long-term memory after 12 months shows that the recollection of their experiences had been both traumatic and emotionally charged. Patients' recollections of both factual events and unreal experiences show very little variation between 3 and 12 months. The unreal experiences were not - after 12 months - their initial recollections, as they had been after 3 months. Their unreal experiences could still be recalled and related after 12 months, but not with the same expression and feeling as earlier (3 months). Patients' fragmentary memories of factual events and their recall of unreal experiences were practically unchanged after 12 month. Their "unreal experiences" were far clearer than their memories of factual occurrences. The patients in this study reported unreal experiences, memory confusion and/or disturbances before admittance to the ICU and before their respirator treatment. The interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The participants were interviewed twice, at 3 and 12 months after their discharge from the ICU.
The study is qualitative and encompasses nine critically ill ICU patients, ventilator-treated for more than 72 h. The purpose of this study is to describe critically ill and ventilator-treated patients' recollections of both factual events and unreal experiences at 3 and 12 months following discharge from the ICU. There is a lack of knowledge regarding how critically ill patients recall of the ICU and their life-threatening condition changes over time.
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