Patient Education in Nursing Care

[AHRQ]

Ever wish there were more hours in the day? Especially when it comes to having discussions with your patients about treatment options for a condition?

Every minute with your patient counts. Maximize your time and effectiveness with reliable tools from AHRQ that support evidence-based medicine.

To help facilitate the discussions with your patients about treatment options, the AHRQ Effective Health Care (EHC) Program has included talking points in all of our clinician research summaries.

For example, the 'What To Discuss With Your Patients' section of the Effectiveness of Self-Measured Blood Pressure Monitoring in Adults With Hypertension clinician summary suggests you discuss:

• The importance of effectively controlling high blood pressure.
  
• The link between measuring blood pressure and controlling high blood pressure.
  
• Adherence to strategies aimed at managing hypertension such as lifestyle and dietary modifications and medication.
  
• How self-measured blood pressure allows patients to participate more actively in managing their blood pressure.
  
• The types of self-measured blood pressure devices available and how to operate the device selected for the patient.
  

And, all clinician research summaries have a corresponding patient summary for use in discussions.

For more information on AHRQ's EHC Program and how you can stay updated on evidence-based treatment information for you and your patients, visit www.effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov.

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The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is the lead Federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services charged with improving the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans.

Comments from anyone outside of AHRQ do not imply an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AHRQ, or any other Federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Health Resources and Services Administration.

[Teresag_CNS]

If we hope to improve the effectiveness of education in the hospital setting, we need to revise the requirements issued by electronic health records. Where I recently practiced, for example, if you checked "heart failure" as an education topic, the structure and function of the heart were on the checklist of topics you had to cover. There is no evidence that explaining the structure and function of the affected organ changes patients' health behaviors. These "laundry lists" must be customizable and evidence-based, but as with much of hospital nursing practice, everything is thrown in there for the nurse to do in order to protect the hospital from liability and maintain regulatory compliance. Expecting nurses to practice according to the needs of the institution, versus the client, is harmful to everyone except the employer.

[Benedina]

An essential preparation for any patient education, including the excellent talking points of AHRQ's clinician summaries, is awareness of your patient's/family's health literacy and effective tools for education. I would recommend two resources:

1. The AHRQ's own Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit

Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit | Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ)

2. The RNAO guide to Facilitating Client-Centered Learning:

http://rnao.ca/sites/rnao-ca/files/BPG_CCL_2012_FA.pdf

Wonderful to see AHRQ beginning a forum here.

Dina

[SHGR, MSN, RN, CNS]

Could you please tell your friends over at Medicare and Medicaid that since there are good outcomes for self-measuring blood pressure, that a home BP cuff should be covered for these patients? We do recommend home monitoring for our patients, but they are reluctant due to cost. I would love to see more home monitoring.

Thanks.