How to develop home-grown patient education
At Haywood (NC) Regional Medical Center, case managers develop patient education materials targeted at high-risk patients for a variety of disciplines within the hospital.
According to Teresa Fugate, RN, director of case management at Haywood, "When we develop the material, we send it to all different disciplines. Total hip, for example: We send it to rehab services and get their input on what we'll be doing with a total hip. They show us what they will be giving for gait training so we can put pictures in there. We can go ahead and give that information to patients during a pre-op clinic visit, then send them to rehab services, after they have already been taught to do gait training even before they ever come in the hospital."
Case managers send similar materials to all disciplines in the hospital, Fugate says. "Then, once we've pulled it all together, we send it to our medical staff specialist. For instance, if it's surgery, we send it to the surgery physicians. If it's congestive heart failure, then we would send it to our internist as well as to our family practitioners," she says.
She notes that a separate committee, including physicians and discharge planners, meets to review "not only discharge planning but also the education that's involved in that continuum."
Case managers at Haywood develop their patient education materials by a set of specific standards:
· All material is written for a 5th grade reading level or below.
"We chose 5th grade because even a lawyer is going to revert back when he doesn't know anything about the medical side of it," Fugate says. "He's still not going to understand any more than a person with a 5th grade education, as far as a diagnosis for disease."
· A large font size is used.
"A lot of your educational material out there in the public now doesn't meet the 5th grade-or-below level because of the small font," she says. "They may be simple in terms, but they're small and people can't read them."
· Color graphics are used.
"We use color so that we can give people pictures of what we're describing," she says. She adds that they also have audio and braille materials for people with disabilities.
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content