Modifying the health teaching process to increase the patient awareness

Type of funding sources: None.

Health teaching is an essential part of the patient journey at any healthcare facility.

Internal audit was carried out in one of the renowned healthcare institutions in the middle east , specifically in the outpatient department. The audit revealed the existence of some issues regarding patients’ familiarity with some aspects of knowledge about their conditions, medications, healthy diets, etc.…. Therefore, it was necessary to assess the patient’s understanding and to re-evaluate the introduced instructions regarding these topics. Nursing leaders in the aforementioned institution were inspired to conduct a quality improvement project that enhanced the patients outcome by assessing patient understanding concerning inpatient health teaching.

A quality improvement project aimed at assessing patients’ understanding regarding health teaching after open-heart surgeries during their hospital stay.

A survey was conducted to assess the patient understanding regarding healthy diet , wound care after surgery, taking the medications, understanding diagnosis, daily activities, follow-up visits and deal with an emergency. Nurse leaders formed a group of internship nursing students to conduct the survey immediately after a health teaching process.

Data was collected and analyzed. Some interventions were implemented to fill the gap of health teaching process and improve the patients outcome.

There were no leaflets or other health teaching materials that could be offered to the patient. 15 health education leaflets were developed to fill in this gap. The health teaching process took place at the time of discharge and the decision was to proceed the patient education from the time of admission. We validated and reinforced the health teaching content with the patient and family before discharge.All patients agreed that their relatives should attend the health teaching sessions and these interventions affected positively the results of survey.

A group of 100 patients were involved in this survey and results revealed the following. It was found that there was a significant impact of the intervention, as shown in ( Figure 1). 69% of patients were only aware about their healthy diet compared with 92% after intervention. Regarding wound care, there was a 14% increase of patient awareness after the intervention. There was a significant difference in terms of the patient understanding about their own diagnosis after the process intervention that reached 27%. The survey showed satisfying numbers before and after the teaching process of follow up date and emergency contact.

Patient teaching is a continuous process starts from the day of admission.Each patient has a suitable way to cope with the provided information in terms of many aspects such as the education level, availability of relative.