Help i need patient education handouts

I find it very hard to believe that any hospital would not have an organized library of patient education materials in this day and age... it is a HUGE liability issue. I would advise the OP to use her employer's process to bring this issue to the attention of the Risk Manager & Quality leaders. The PP is absolutely correct, using Internet-based materials can easily violate copyright laws & may not be accurate, based on current evidence.

It is risky to hand out any materials that have not been approved by the employing facility. You may run the risk of overlooking a drug interaction or someother caution... if harm results, you would be in the crosshairs of a lawsuit; the employer would not be liable because you were not adhering to established policy. I know that nurses have a professional obligation to educate our patients, but we also have to abide by the rules of our employers. Yet another reason that nursing is so stressful, right??

Abso-freakin-lutely!!

I work in Home Health. No longer a road warrior, have been in charge of providing patient education materials for our road nurses for the past year. I spend a LOT of time online searching for the best available patient education handouts to send out to the home.

Here are a few links to those which I have found to be not only informative, but easy to read and understand:

Interactive Health Tutorials: MedlinePlus ... click on the condition or subject of your choice and it will bring up a page which has several options.. click on the "text summary" option and voila! A lovely, pdf format printable handout. Here is a link as an example of what it looks like: Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm: MedlinePlus Interactive Health Tutorial from the Patient Education Institute

then THIS is what you'll see after choosing "text summary":

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorials/abdominalaorticaneurysm/vs049103.pdf

I use these a lot, and there are quite a few to choose from. Some do not have the text summary version, but most do.

For those of you in HH or geriatrics, this site has some awesome printable materials as well : NIHSeniorHealth Home Page

This site, too, is a good one (once open click on "publications") http://www.nia.nih.gov/health/publication

Lots of good material there.. love their "Age Page" handouts.

I will copy some more saved links I have at work and try to include them here this week.. I've found some really nice material out there, including Hispanic versions ! :)

Try merckmedicus.com it's free u just have t make a user name and password. A good stir for medication education is drugs.com. Hope this helps

www.ahrq.gov Agency for Health Research and quality. Government sponsored have info for patients, nurses and clinicians. You can download and get mailed copies for no cost, even shipping is free.