Congress Abstracts 2003

82

A PATIENT EDUCATION VIDEO TO ENHANCE LEARNING OF ESSENTIAL INFORMATION IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTOPERATIVE PERIOD FOLLOWING SURGERY FOR BREAST CANCER. Patricia Simpson, RN, BA, BSN, Bettye Smedley, RN, and Jan Hawthorne Maxson, RN, MSN, AOCN^®, University Hospitals of Cleveland, Cleveland, OH.

Educators have long recognized that educational tools that stimulate multiple senses are more successful in achieving academic objectives. Nurses must often circumvent senses altered by disease to appeal to those senses that remain. An additional challenge faced by nurses is that patients are often so overwhelmed by their diagnosis and treatment decisions that their capacity to learn essential information for optimal recovery is compromised. The nursing staff of our women’s surgical oncology unit identified patients with breast cancer as an especially vulnerable population. This group of patients is often required to make important treatment decisions in a short period of time. Despite printed resources and one-on-one instructional sessions preoperatively, patients struggle to retain the required content nursing identified as essential to their immediate postoperative recovery. The twenty-four hour inpatient hospitalization served as an additional challenge to our nursing staff to meet the unique learning needs of this group of patients. A patient education video appealing to the senses of vision, hearing, and touch was developed as an instructional tool to meet constraints imposed by time and human retention. Our unit staff, with the benefit of a wealth of nursing experience and existing patient instructional resources, developed the script for the video. Funding was secured and a production company was identified to produce the video according to our specifications. Nurses previewed and critiqued several demonstration tapes to achieve a final product that accurately communicated critical clinical information to the diverse population that we serve. The result is a patient instruction video that is available to all patients undergoing surgery for breast cancer. Patient evaluations have demonstrated that our video has become a valuable component in the comprehensive care that our unit and our institution supports and cherishes.