Media richness and social information processing: rationale for multifocal continuing medical education activities

Animation program used to encourage patients or family members to take an active role for eliminating wrong-site, wrong-person, wrong-procedure surgeries: preliminary evaluation

BACKGROUND

Wrong-site surgeries (including wrong-site, wrong-person and wrong-procedure errors) remain the number one problem among adverse events of health care delivery. Patients and/or family members should be involved when possible to help prevent such errors.

AIMS

1) Design an educational animation program about patient safety for patients and/or family members to help eliminate wrong-site surgery errors. 2) Evaluate its educational effect.

METHODS

The animation developed for this study includes an introduction, hypothetical story, and guided information, and was presented at a tertiary medical center in northern Taiwan. A single-group pretest and posttest design was used.

RESULTS

Forty-six patients and 48 family members participated in the study. The pre-training score was 3.6 (on a scale of 1-4). After watching the animation, there was no significant increase (0.08 ± 0.5) for the patient group, but the family member group showed significant improvement (0.21 ± 0.6, P = .0309). Most participants (98.9%) were satisfied with the animation.

CONCLUSION

The majority of participants reported good practices for avoiding wrong-site surgery mistakes before an operation. A significant improvement of post-training scores in the family member group was seen. The high satisfaction rating given by the participants after seeing the animation indicates that it was generally acceptable.

Domains-based outcomes assessment of continuing medical education: the VA's model

Demonstrating outcomes of continuing medical education (CME) efforts has become increasingly important to CME providers, accrediting organizations, and licensing bodies. Many CME providers have difficulty defining the nature of the outcomes, much less documenting the outcomes for which they are responsible. The vague nature of the terms "outcome," "impact," or "result" in the complexity of health care and medical education environments is a particular obstacle to many education providers. To overcome these barriers, the VA's Employee Education System (EES), a large CME provider, created a model identifying five major domains of possible outcomes for CME interventions; these are the domains of individual participants, employee teams, the larger organization, patients, and the community. These domains are useful in either assessing a single CME activity's outcomes or comprehensively assessing a CME provider's outcomes-assessment strategy. The use of such a domains-based outcomes-management strategy links organizational mission, needs assessment, specific activity assessment, and assessment of the overall education program. This approach may be useful to CME providers, accrediting and licensing bodies, or others interested in the relationship of CME outcomes to the activities of CME providers.