Ideas That Work: Make Discharge Instructions Short and Sweet

Practical pearls from your colleagues

As a surgeon on the forefront of outpatient colectomies, Laila Rashidi, MD, FACS, FASCRS, assigns a high value to patient selection.

Her process goes beyond a series of clinical health screenings. In addition to her patients being relatively young, healthy and part of a social network who can support themselves postoperatively, Dr. Rashidi, who serves as medical director for colon surgery at MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Wash., wants her patients to be engaged and willing to learn about their procedures.

Dr. Rashidi understands the value of keeping things simple, even for patients who take an active role in their care. That’s why the discharge instructions she provides to patients aren’t filled with dense, lengthy paragraphs about what to do. Instead, she gives them a list of bullet points about various aspects of their postoperative self-care and how to perform those tasks.

“I sit with the patients and family to explain everything before they leave, and we have a follow-up appointment after the procedures,” says Dr. Rashidi. “As far as the instructions go, I find that they understand them better in a bullet-point format. They’re easier to read and digest. Think about it: Would you rather have a packet with two pages of text in it or simple bullet points to follow about diet, wound dressings, showering and every other aspect of post-op care?” OSM