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A novel approach to educate hospitalized cardiovascular disease patients about lifestyle and behavior modifications
Atiyeh Saboktakin1, Mohammad Mehdi Sepehri2, Roghaye Khasha3
1Faculty of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, 1411713116, Tehran, Iran.
Insights
Improving cardiovascular disease patient education is crucial. This study presents a novel framework to address challenges like workload and patient understanding, enhancing self-care skills and health outcomes.
Area of Science:
- Healthcare Management
- Patient Education
- Cardiovascular Health
Background:
- Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) pose significant public health challenges due to high prevalence, costs, and mortality.
- Effective management of CVDs relies heavily on patient behavior and lifestyle modification.
- Enhanced self-care skills through improved training are essential for patients and caregivers.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and evaluate a novel framework for enhancing cardiovascular patient education processes.
- To identify and address key challenges within existing patient training systems for CVDs.
- To improve patient understanding and engagement in self-care for chronic conditions.
Main Methods:
- Reviewed existing cardiovascular patient training systems.
- Conducted field observations and expert interviews to map current educational processes.
- Utilized semi-structured interviews to identify and prioritize training challenges using a Multiple Criteria Decision-making (MCDM) method.
- Investigated root causes of challenges and designed improvement scenarios.
Main Results:
- Key challenges identified include high nursing workload, patient comprehension difficulties, lack of attention, caregiver interference, and language barriers.
- Root cause analysis highlighted the critical roles of the learner, educator, and educational tools.
- Improvement scenarios were developed focusing on these core components.
Conclusions:
- The proposed framework, developed using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, shows significant potential for improving patient education.
- Effective patient education is vital for managing chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease.
- The framework offers a structured approach to overcome common barriers in patient training.
Background:
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are always considered by healthcare specialists for different reasons, including extensive prevalence, increased costs, chronicity, and high risk of death. The control of CVDs is highly influenced by behavior and lifestyle and it seems necessary to train special abilities about lifestyle and behavior modification to improve self-care skills for patients, and their caregivers. As a result, the development of effective training systems should be considered by healthcare specialists.
Methods:
Hence, in this study, a framework for improving cardiovascular patients' education processes is presented. Initially, an existing training system for cardiovascular patients is reviewed. Using field observations and targeted interviews with hospital experts, all components of its educating processes are identified, and their process maps are drawn up. After that, challenges in the training system are extracted with the aid of in-depth semi-structured interviews with experts. Due to the importance and different influence of the identified challenges, they are prioritized using a Multiple Criteria Decision-making (MCDM) method, and then their root causes were investigated. Finally, a novel framework is proposed and evaluated with hospital experts' help to improve the main challenges.
Results:
The most important challenges included high nursing workload and shortage of time, lack of understanding of training concepts by patients, lack of attention to training, disruption of the training processes by the patients' caregivers, and patient's weakness in understanding the standard language. In identifying the root causes, learner, educator, and educational tools are the most effective in the training process; therefore, the improvement scenarios were designed accordingly in the proposed framework.
Conclusions:
Our study indicated that presenting a framework with applying different quantitative and qualitative methods has great potential to improve the processes of patient education for chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease.
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