Clinical trial NCT03893968: Are Doctors and Assistant Nurses Equally Good at Informing Patients
Official title: Are Doctors and Assistant Nurses Equally Good at Informing Patients: A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Information Recall Regarding Postoperative Self-care
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Patient Care
Lead sponsor: Umeå University
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2019-03-28
Enrollment: 72
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Intervention model description: Patients are assigned to either a group informed by doctors or assistance nurses in parallel.
Primary purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Brief summary: 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.

Detailed 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.

Eligibility criteria: 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

Primary outcomes:
measure: Information recall
timeFrame: 1 week after surgery
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Stress and satisfaction
timeFrame: 1 week after surgery
measure: Additional healthcare contacts
timeFrame: 30 days after surgery
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Umeå
country: Sweden
facility: Norrland's University Hospital
state: Sverige
Study officials:
affiliation: Umea University
name: Martin Fahlström
role: STUDY_CHAIR
References: