Award Date

1-1-2006

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)

Department

Nursing

First Committee Member

Lori Candela

Number of Pages

84

Abstract

Patient education is an essential part of the nursing process and is part of every nurse-patient interaction. A better patient outcome is the combination of teaching completeness and patient comprehension. When the nurse-patient interaction takes place in the emergency department (ED), the instruction is taking place in a less than conducive environment; The ED's have become a health care safety net for people with a variety of available resources and literacy levels. An indicator of how well patient education is accomplished by looking at this teaching through the patient's eyes. A sample of 30 adult patients was surveyed one week after being treated and released from the ED. They were asked 6 Likert-type survey questions dealing with their discharge education process, 5 yes/no questions dealing with clarification of their instructions and 4 demographic questions. An analysis of variance was conducted on their responses; There were no statistical differences found in this study and patients were relatively satisfied with their instructions. The greatest variation was found in the 56 and older age groups, which correlates with previous studies. This suggests that nursing needs to assess their patients' educational needs to effectively educate them at a time in their lives when chronic illnesses are becoming more prevalent. Replication of this study using a larger, more diverse sample population should be completed to further validate these findings.

Keywords

Department; Discharge; Emergency; Instruction; Patients; Perceptions

Controlled Subject

Nursing; Health services administration

File Format

pdf

File Size

2170.88 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

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