Personalized patient ed...

Just giving patients information doesn’t make them better.  The new information needs to be incorporated into their behaviors and become part of new self-care routines.  They need to internalize that information, and apply it. One recent randomized controlled trial looked at how...

After saving lives, pat...

After saving lives, the most important service of health care providers is patient and family education. Think about it. Patients come to us, wanting and needing our help.  We intervene, and save their lives.  But we won’t always be there to take care of them.  At some point,...

Patients say they under...

Here’s another reason to evaluate understanding of your patient education through teach-back and return demonstration.  If you ask a patient if he understands or if he has any questions, he may express confident comfort in his knowledge, but may actually not understand at all. In...

Patient education teach...

So what teaching methods work best? A systematic review of patient education methods used with patients who had coronary artery bypass graft surgery found that teaching was most effective when: • the content was individualized, • given in a combination of media on an individual...

Patients don’t know t...

One study found that 96% of patients could not name one or more medicines they were getting in the hospital.  Many patients also assumed they were continuing to get the meds they take at home (such as blood pressure medicine). The study proposes that patients be given their hospital...