Study Shows Parents’ Poor Health Literacy Inhibits Patient Care
VIENNA, Austria — Poor health literacy on the part of a patient or caregiver may cloud their understanding of post-discharge care instructions, threatening patient safety, a new study from the Medical University of Vienna found.
The cross-sectional study conducted by Ph.D. student Fabian Eibensteiner and his team focused on medically complex children treated at the Medical University of Vienna between May 2018 and January 2019.
Their goal was to evaluate the prevalence of, and risk factors for, medication misunderstanding and potential harm at discharge.
Their findings were published in the November edition of the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
They found that despite high levels of satisfaction with care while in a hospital, many caregivers do not understand medication management instructions at discharge.
Further, these misunderstandings are more likely to occur when a higher number of new prescriptions are given, when medication-related information is communicated poorly or when other language or literacy barriers are present.
The researchers looked at the cases of 106 children with a median age of 9 years and six months, who were prescribed a median number of five different medications upon discharge.
They found that in 78.3% of cases, there was at least one identifiable instance of an instruction being misunderstood. In 31.1% of these cases, these misunderstandings were potentially harmful.
The relative risk of personal harm increased by more than twofold when new medications were added to the post-discharge equation.
The researchers concluded that despite continuous care in the same hospital, a high level of subjective satisfaction and a high prevalence of medication misunderstanding with relevant risk for personal harm was discovered in medically complex children and their caregivers.
“This demonstrates the need of interventions to improve patient safety, with stratification of medication-related communication for high-risk groups and a restructured discharge process focusing on detection of misunderstandings (‘unknown unknowns’),” the researchers said.
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