Background: Medication education for patients and caregivers can significantly impact patient safety. New medications are often introduced during a patient’s acute hospitalization. Without proper education, patients may not recognize these medications, their indications or their potential side effects. Printable electronic information may be insufficient as each medication may be associated with an overwhelmingly exhaustive list of indications and side effects. A hospitalist-led multidisciplinary meeting can identify new medications initiated for patients that can be taught to patients when dispensed by nursing staff.
Purpose: To improve patient safety by enhancing medication education, using a multidisciplinary approach to identify new medications, create a list of a primary indication and side effect for each medication, and incorporate a process of patient education into the existing patient care workflow.
Description: A multidisciplinary team led by a hospitalist identified the 50 most frequently prescribed medications on our medical unit, and created information cards with each medication’s name, the most common indication, and the most frequently encountered potential side effect. During our standard daily multidisciplinary meeting led by a hospitalist unit medical director, new medications initiated for patients were identified, and the corresponding medication card was given to the nurse for teaching. When the patient had severe cognitive impairment, a caregiver at the bedside was taught. Patients were excluded from teaching if they had severe cognitive impairment and there were no caregivers present. Each medication was taught for three days by both day and night shift nurses before education was initiated on another medication. We surveyed patients during a 3 week baseline period (n=31) and during the 6 month intervention period (n=200) to determine patient perception of education regarding their medication. We found that patients significantly were more likely to report being educated about their medications during the intervention period than the baseline period (64% vs 45%, p<0.05).
Conclusions: We developed a multidisciplinary process to promote medication education that entailed simple modifications of a daily multidisciplinary meeting and nursing workflow. Patient awareness of their new medications was significantly improved as a result of our improvement in communication. Ongoing data is needed to assess the long term sustainability of this intervention, and the effect on metrics such as patient satisfaction.