Are Doctors and Assistant Nurses Equally Good at Informing Patients

Umeå University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Patient Care

Treatments: Behavioral: Information by an assistant nurse; Behavioral: Information by a doctor

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03893968

2017/446-31

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Full description

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.

Enrollment: 72 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• about to undergo elective hand surgical procedure in local anaesthesia
• 18 years or older.

Exclusion criteria

• does not speak Swedish
• dementia or other form av cognitive impairment

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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72 participants in 2 patient groups

Informed by a doctor

Experimental group

Description:

Information by a doctor

Treatment:

Behavioral: Information by a doctor

Informed by an assistant nurse

Experimental group

Description:

Information by an assistant nurse

Treatment:

Behavioral: Information by an assistant nurse