Improving Bowel Preparation for Colonoscopy With a Simple Educational Card

Boston Medical Center (BMC)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Colonic Polyps; Colonic Neoplasms

Treatments: Other: Educational card

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT00643682

BMC-GI-1

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this study is to determine whether adding a simple educational card to standard pre-procedure instructions improves the quality of bowel preparation for colonoscopy.

Full description

Despite written instructions, many patients do not understand the importance of bowel preparation as they prepare for colonoscopy. This often leads to poor compliance with preparation protocol and therefore inadequate bowel preparation. Our goal is to include a simple educational card which will hopefully improve the quality of bowel preparation by providing a visual component with the preparation instructions. This card will stress the importance of drinking the entire bowel preparation and provide representative images of a dirty and clean colon. We will specifically target patients directly booked for screening colonoscopy (those without a pre-procedure office visit). In a randomized fashion, patients in the control group will receive the standard bowel preparation instructions and patients in the intervention group will receive the educational card along with the standard bowel preparation instructions. The primary outcome will be the endoscopist's assessment of the quality of preparation using a standardized bowel preparation scale. Secondary outcomes will include the number and types of polyps found, colonoscope insertion and withdrawal time, and patient satisfaction with the procedure.

Enrollment: 2,000 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Outpatients
• 18 years old or older
• Referred and scheduled for an elective screening colonoscopy

Exclusion criteria

• Inpatients
• Prisoners
• Cognitively impaired patients
• Legally blind patients
• Patients allergic to polyethylene glycol electrolyte lavage solution

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

---

2,000 participants in 2 patient groups

A

Experimental group

Description:

Patients in this arm will be given an educational card in addition to the standard pre-endoscopy instructions.

Treatment:

Other: Educational card

B

No Intervention group

Description:

Patients in this arm will be given the standard pre-endoscopy instructions.