Empowering Excellence
- Develop a nursing-led (and nursing-owned) patient education pathway that delivers the highest quality, evidence/guideline-based and most up-to-date material.
- Engage frontline nurses to buy-in and actively participate in an improvement initiative.
- Establish consistency in patient education among multiple sites, creating a streamlined and efficient workflow for nurses and the assurance of high quality education for patients.
Engage frontline nurses across 22 clinic sites to improve workflows that provide up-to-date, evidence and guideline-based patient education to ensure sustainable improvement.
Proposed change:
A forum was created for nurses to discuss their patient education process, the positive and negative aspects, and become active participants and leaders in finding a solution to overcome stated barriers. Understanding the workflows and local nuances at each practice site was central to the success of this project. Led by the perinatal nursing educator, the nursing and provider team agreed upon a list of standardized patient education topics and an associated time line of when to offer education. One pamphlet was chosen for each topic to be used across all practice sites. The nursing team then partnered with representatives from information technology to build a patient education module, which was designed to inform nurses when specific education was to be covered and to provide an intuitive, efficient pathway for appropriate documentation in the electronic health record.
Implementation, outcomes and evaluation:
A streamlined process was created so all nurses across the 22 women’s health sites provide the same high quality education to every patient. Additionally, if a patient is seen at different clinics the documentation module provides a comprehensive snapshot of what education has already been provided so the nurse is able to seamlessly pick up where the previous nurse left off.
Finally, a uniform process was established that allowed nurses to easily order education materials and propose changes to the standardized list of education.
Outcomes include: an increase in staff satisfaction; a reduction in time required to document patient education, allowing more time to spend on educating the patient; and a reduction in materials and overall cost. Additionally, issues around providing education on specific topics surfaced which led to an in-depth follow-up with nursing staff and interventions to improve nursing comfort with all aspects of patient education.
Implications for nursing practice:
By incorporating the principles of evidence based practice, adult education, and process reliability, nurses can develop and implement patient education programs that really work! This session will give nurses the tools that they need to critically evaluate their education process and design meaningful, cost effective changes that impact patient outcomes.
Keywords:
Patient education, quality improvement, streamline, process improvement
