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Learning Objective 1: improve patient safety by targeting patient educational material for preventing healthcare associated infections.
Learning Objective 2: improve written patient education material for supporting patients empowerment and increasing patients´participation.
Infection control priorities have been to reduce surgical site infections and to increase patients' participatory by empowering patient education. In patient education, it is common to use written material, which should to be understandable and support patients' empowerment. Surgical patient education (PE) materials should have a good quality of the content, support patients empowerment and participation in care as well as reduce surgical site infections and improve patient safety. However, the systematic information on the infection control content and the quality of materials is missing. The purpose was to analyze the surgical patient education materials for the quality, capacity to support empowering patient education and for the infection control-related content.
Methods:
The data consisted of surgical PE materials (N=237) for adults in all Finnish university hospitals and every fifth (n=50) were analyzed for the quality of the content with previously developed instrument. Deductive content analysis was done to analyze the capabilities to support empowering patient education and inductive content analysis was used for the infection control-related content.
Results:
The quality of the PE materials varied substantially. Only 36 % (n=18) of PE materials were published in the past three years (2010–2012) period. The best feature of the quality was the appearance and the structure of language. PE materials supported functional and bio-physiological dimensions of the empowerment, describing the surgical procedure and coping with it. The main infection control content was related to hand hygiene although its implementation was not guided or instructed. In general, infection prevention was indicated indirectly through health related problems such as “obesity” and “the condition of the skin”.
Conclusion:
The quality of PE was rather good as PE materials were visually clear and consistent. Thus, capacity to support patient participation and empower them to reduce infections needs to be improved for ensuring patient safety.