Are your materials up to date?
Put tracking system in place for timely review
Once patient education materials have been approved for use at a health care facility, a method needs to be put into place for tracking the materials and keeping the information up to date. At Egleston-Scottish Rite Children’s Health Care System in Atlanta, an index of all patient education materials is kept on the facility’s computer network. The database includes the following information:
• the name of the pamphlet, teaching sheet, video, or other material;
• the material’s publisher, whether in-house or outside the institution;
• the content expert(s) who reviewed the material;
• the departments that are using the educational materials, or if the material is department-specific;
• the date the material was created or purchased.
Materials are reviewed every three years to see whether they need to be updated. Therefore, having the database on a computer makes it possible to quickly check the list for material that needs to be updated. "If we see at the beginning of 1999 we have 50 teaching sheets that will become outdated that year, we know we have to review those and see if they need to be updated or not. We give the sheets out to content experts for review," says Kathy Ordelt, RN, CRRN, CPN, patient and family education coordinator at Egleston-Scottish Rite.
Also, staff alert the patient and family education committee when a new drug or procedure comes along. For example, if a new drug for asthma is introduced, the asthma protocols would be changed to include the new drug. When something new is introduced, the material is automatically reviewed and updated, even if it has only been on the database for six months.
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