Perceived self-care information needs and information--seeking behaviors before and after elective spinal procedures

Patients undergoing elective lumbar spinal surgical procedures pose a challenge to nurses who provide discharge instruction, because the decreased length of stay (LOS) severely limits time for comprehensive discharge instruction. The perspectives of 15 adult patients on their perceived self-care information needs and information seeking behaviors following elective spinal surgical procedures were examined. Content analytic techniques were used to categorize responses. Preoperatively, a majority of the subjects (93.3%) indicated that the neurosurgeon rather than the nurse, was anticipated to be the sole source of information related to self-care needs. Postdischarge, more than half of the subjects reported that they had difficulty describing the teaching session because they were either too sedated due to the analgesia, or were experiencing extreme pain at the time the discharge instruction was being delivered. Results substantiate the importance of supplementing oral discharge instruction with comprehensive written discharge instruction and of increasing public awareness of the teaching expertise of nurses.