Educational needs of inpatients with severe & persistent mental illness: a partial replication

Although a great deal has been written about the importance of patient education, few replications of past research have been conducted to increase clinicians' confidence in the conclusions of previous studies. This is especially true of studies conducted in clinical settings where findings may or may not be generalizable to other institutions. This partial replication study tested whether previous findings about patient education in an outpatient setting were applicable to an inpatient setting using a modified version of the instrument. A 1998 study published in this journal suggested that differences may exist between the perceived health education needs of outpatients and their health care providers. In this partial replication, we examined the differences between the educational needs of inpatients and those perceived by their attending nurses. As in the original study, we found discrepancies between patients' actual needs and nurses' perceptions of those needs, supporting the importance of assessing patients' health educational needs in the treatment planning process.