Interesting discoveries

First, it has been great speaking with my advisor...great to share my thoughts and receive some clarification from Dr. J.

So moving right along two things:

Storyboards as education tools for nursing staff pose some unique challenges. There are set forms provided by the individual facility. Many topics for education either are for new information or as reviews. The audience includes RNs, LPNs, and CNAs. There might be specific protocol for each hospital that needs to be examined. Most facilities even have a set form for the introduction of why,how, and what of expected outcomes. Storyboard (self-learning packets) require a post-test.
Technical writing places an important part in the presentation of the material. At my meeting Dr. J. offered some valid and welcomed suggestion. For my dry run storyboard, I had been most concerned with clarity of the information, content, and the who, what, how, and why...she added more detailed application (why)into the mix. Also the use of color might be more effective co-ordinated differently with more visuals and varied fonts.
I nixed the idea of statistics because practical experience has shown me statistics BORE us nurses.

I have been looking at tools for evaluating the content of patient education materials as well as tools for evaluating health care literacy.

For the material evaluation, SMOG (simple measure of gobblydegook)and Lextile will require more evaluation over the next few weeks. This may prove useful for my evaluation of patient information pertaining to Coumadin(my selected topic for evaluation because of its importance to Joint Commission and my frequent responsibility in my work.

Preliminary research on literacy tools, Newest Vital Sign and REALM appear to have very limited, specific audience. NVS requires math and critical thinking skills along with reading. For NVS, the patient does not look at the questions and is offered no scrap paper. While looking at an ice cream label, 5 questions are scored by the tester. REALM appears to correlate word recognition with familiarity of the definition of the word spoken. I believe the label reading would be very important for patients with specific medical conditions such as diabetes, renal failure, congestive heart failure. The REALM in my experience of vocabulary and meanings might be limited. (This is even more apparent with a review of Clear Language and AMA recommendations of words to avoid). Both are English oriented, although I believe NVS now has a Spanish version. How will the needs of cognitively and developmentally challenged placed. How about those with learning, speech, and hearing difficulties? I do want to contact Dr. TD regarding these lackings.

Interesting sidebar: many hospitals are now using a special translation phone to provide access to many languages taking the place of in-house translators or the regular phone translators where the nurse states the question to the translator on the phone, then the translator addresses the patient, finally the patient can ask questions of the nurse through the translator on the phone. This would not be a very efficient or safe method for use of the "Teach Back" method.

All of these issues will be continued to be investigated as well as work on annotated bibliography.