Are Doctors and Assistant Nurses Equally Good at Informing Patients: A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Information Recall Regarding Postoperative Self-care
Are Doctors and Assistant Nurses Equally Good at Informing Patients: A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Information Recall Regarding Postoperative Self-care
Objectives: to compare patients' recall of information regarding postoperative self-care when being informed by either doctors or assistant nurses.
Methods: a non-blinded randomized single-center controlled trial being conducted at a hand-surgical unit in Northern Sweden. Included are adult ambulatory patients about to undergo surgery in local anesthesia. Patients are randomized into two parallel groups, with the control-group being informed by doctors and the intervention-group by assistant nurses. Patients will be telephoned one week after surgery for assessment of information recall via a structured telephone-interview.
The study was conducted within the hand-surgical unit at Norrland's University Hospital in Umeå, county of Västerbotten, in Sweden. There are three hospitals in this sparsely populated county of 55432〖km〗^2 with about 268000 in population. The hand-surgery unit serves both the local population and is a tertiary referral center.
As the healthcare in Sweden is funded by taxpayers, the healthcare for patients is free, apart from a small nominal fee. There was a total of seven doctors and seven assistant nurses participating in the study, all having several years of experience working with hand-surgical care. Prior to the study, doctors had the formal responsibility of informing patients about their postoperative care. However, despite it being the surgeons' responsibility, the task of informing patients was at times performed by assistant nurses. After receiving the information, patients were discharged and left the clinic. Normally patients receive a complementary written information after being informed verbally. Patients included in the study did not receive the written information, since it might have been a confounding factor in understanding of information.
Inclusion Criteria:
Exclusion Criteria: