Estimating Patient Empowerment and Nurses' Use of Digital Strategies: eSurvey Study.

Olga Navarro Martínez,Vicente Traver Salcedo,Jorge Igual García

doi:10.3390/ijerph18189844

Abstract

Patient empowerment is seen as the capability to understand health information and make decisions based on it. It is a competence that can improve self-care, adherence and overall health. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for information and has also reduced the number of visits to health centers. Nurses have had to adapt in order to continue offering quality care in different environments such as the digital world, but this entails assessing the level of their patients’ empowerment and adapting material and educational messages to new realities. The aim of this study is, on the one hand, to assess nurses’ use of digital resources to provide reinforcing information to their patients and, on the other hand, to evaluate how they assess the level of empowerment of their patients. To perform the study, 850 nurses answered 21 questions related to their own digital literacy and patients’ empowerment. The ability to make decisions is the characteristic most selected by nurses (70%) as useful in measuring patient empowerment, whereas 9.19% do not measure it in any way. Printed material is most often used by nurses to offer additional information to patients (71.93%), mobile applications are the least used option (21.58%), and elder nurses are those who most recommend digital resources. In this study, younger nurses make little or no use of technology as a resource for training and monitoring patients. In spite of some limitations concerning the study, digital health needs to be promoted as an indisputable tool in the nurse’s briefcase in the future to ensure that older patients can manage electronic resources in different fields.

Highlights

One of the communication forms that has necessarily grown exponentially during the pandemic has been the digital. This paradigm change caused by the pandemic has affected in a very important way professionals who adapted new communication approaches and patients, especially older patients with chronic pathology who, with some cause, we assume to have fewer digital skills and a lower health literacy
In Spain, this has meant that follow-up programs for patients with chronic diseases have been halted, which has left part of the population unattended in terms of healthcare advice, mainly given and managed by nurses
Stating clearly that there is not a single accepted definition of patient empowerment, it was highly valuable to analyze the strategies the nurses have to measure the level of empowerment of their patients, where most of the strategies were subjective and were based on the perception from the nurse of the patient’s ability to make decisions

Summary

Introduction

One of the communication forms that has necessarily grown exponentially during the pandemic has been the digital. This paradigm change caused by the pandemic has affected in a very important way professionals who adapted new communication approaches and patients, especially older patients with chronic pathology who, with some cause, we assume to have fewer digital skills and a lower health literacy. Patient empowerment is a trend that aims to change the paternalistic healthcare system and empower patients, especially those with chronic conditions [1]. Patient empowerment is not exclusively a pandemic-related need but can be very useful in such cases.

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Conclusion