A patient education MAP: an integrated, collaborative approach for rehabilitation

Because Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation has been faced with decreasing patient lengths of stay, increasing patient acuity, and changes in the nurse staffing mix, nurses wanted to ensure that patients and their families were receiving appropriate education and learning the skills required to provide safe and competent self-care in the home. As a result, they developed a patient education action plan. This multidiscipline action plan (MAP) involved changing from a multidisciplinary to an interdisciplinary approach toward patient and family education. This plan provides a framework that is linked to expected outcomes for education during a patient's stay, reduces the redundancy of patient education by professionals from different disciplines, and increases collaboration. Teaching modules that outline and provide all of the information an educator needs to effectively teach a patient or group of patients make up the basis for the MAP system. This article describes the MAP system and the related continuous quality improvement activities, offers documentation forms, and identifies a structural path.