Celebrating Nurses’ Monumental Impact
There is a myriad of ways to participate in National Nurses Week, which is celebrated May 6-12, from honoring your staff RNs with a gift or event to taking steps to let...
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By: Pegi Wasserman
Published: 9/3/2015
To call or not to call? Discharged patients may be either extremely reluctant or far too eager to reach out to their surgeons once they're home and experiencing real or perceived post-operative symptoms. How helpful would it be if they knew exactly which developments warranted further communication, and which didn't?
At our facility, what began as an adjunct to a practice bundle designed to reduce colon surgical site infections has evolved into an easy-to-understand patient teaching tool that helps us achieve that goal.
One of our initial concerns for the bundle was that we wanted it to be evidence-based. While researching literature to find specific needs and strategies for post-operative patient teaching and post-discharge follow-up, I came across a thought-provoking study in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons (osmag.net/VTygZ8). By using a method called the Delphi technique, in which a panel of experts establishes a consensus, a group of 11 experts had developed an early-warning system to prevent readmissions after colorectal surgery.
Consensus was defined as having been reached when at least 70% of the experts rated a symptom as 4 or 5 on a 5-point Likert scale (ranging from 1, meaning "strongly disagree," to 5, meaning "strongly agree"). The experts identified 10 symptoms that indicate to patients that they should call their physicians and 2 additional symptoms that should alert patients to seek emergency care.
12 WARNING SIGNS
When Post-op Patients Should Call Their Docs
Call your physician if you experience:
Go to the emergency department if you:
True emergencies
I thought, why not communicate those concepts in patient-centric language on a take-home card? We could introduce and review the 12 warning signs with the patient and the patient's family before discharge. Then, as part of the post-discharge follow-up phone call, a nurse would review the signs again and field any questions.
The goal is to deliver the best patient care by triaging post-operative issues and by confining emergency department visits to those that are true emergencies.
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