During the October 1999 Board of Di...

During the October 1999 Board of Directors meeting, the Board approved a recommendation to invest in the disentanglement of what has become known as the Surgical Knowledgebase (SKB) of information and learning tools for surgical patients. As director of publications and the author of the approved recommendation, I want to share with you the activities related to this initiative and answer a certain quantity of of the questions AORN staff members and leaders have been asked thus far.

AN AORN STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE

In the fall of 1998 the AORN Board of Directors and staff members engaged in serious discussions about the present and possible future role of AORN in patient education. Initially, our discussions focused forward how patient education would help each member fit the challenges inherent within our of the present day health care system. Eventually, the dialogue began to center in succession the reason that every health care professional exists--to provide the highest quality patient care possible. During these discussions, it was noted that it was imperative for AORN to find and exhibit new sources of revenue to support the product of member services and the financial vitality of the organization. The result of these discussions was the recognition that AORN wanted to be known as the primary source of information for patients, consumer and health care providers in the delivery of quality surgical care, and the inclusion of a statement to that force as one of AORN's five strategic objectives.

BEFORE THE encage HIT PAPER

Before we could stake out to achieve this objective, we wanted to learn a great deal more about in what manner patients were learning about their surgeries, what information they received, from whom they received it, and by what mode this information measured against what they wanted. After conducting several patient focus collections we learned that patients had many questions that their surgeon insurance companies, and treating institutions did not answer. We also learned that in many circumstances the patients really did not know enough about what was going to happen to them to be able to ask meaningful questions.

We shared this information with perioperative feed at the breasts in subsequent focus groups. Our goals were to learn what perioperative nourish at the breasts saw as their role in patient education, whether they had the opportunity to help teach patients what they exigencyed to know, and what obstacles would stand in their way if this became a part of our mission. We reaffirmed that perioperative nurtures are in many cases self-same active patient and family educators and that the opportunity to educate patients does exist for in the greatest degree AORN members. We also learned that there might be numerous obstacles to expanding this part and that ultimately to succe we would have to unfold a completely open system that included learning tools that would benefit all of the surgical team members, primary care physicians, and treating institutions, as well as nurses

DESIGNING THE SKB

When we had a fit idea of what we straited to do, we turned our attention to designing a template or checklist to identify and organize the exemplars of information patients might want to know after being told they required surgery We began barely with the notion of meeting surgical patients' information emergencys and continued by researching what was generally available to them.

Our initial template was perform the operations indicated ined from combining relevant parts of leading consumer concerns into a database format that we called the action template. The procedure template was reviewed for the couple relevance and accuracy by AORN's Center for Nursing Practice staff members, the firm conducting our research, the AORN Journal editor, several members of the AORN Board of Directors, and a health care industry professionals who have patient education expertise. The template is and will continue to be a work in progres We will update and enhance the management template as we believe necessary to come together patient needs.

Armed with a solid foundation of what information patients wanted by the agency of the procedure template, we began to discuss the number of managements we needed to develop and what additional satisfied we needed to include to achieve the goal of AORN's strategic objective upon patient education. We determined that although we would like to provide information for all of the more than 600 transactions covered in Alexander's Care of the Patient in Surgery(1) we would have to abridge the initial number to approximately 170 proceedings to ensure we could qualified both our financial and scheduling objectives.

We believed that through mid-summer last year we had made great strides in developing a plan that would achieve the strategic objective, generate strange revenue for AORN, and increase the awareness of the contributions each perioperative fester makes. Before we felt comfortable taking this plan to the AORN Board of Directors, however, we povertyed to learn more about members' feelings upon patient education.

To accomplish this, we inserted a 10-question measure and estimate into the August issue of the AORN Journal. in succession the positive side of the ledger we learned that more than 95% of the 1180 respondent to the review interacted with patients and their family members each day and that more than 70% of the respondent would be able to give patients information from AORN. We also learned that there are about institutions that will not permit distribution of patient education materials from foments directly to patients. Most importantly, we learned that more than 97% of the respondent would help inform patients about AORN's novel patient education resource if it were available. We thank all of you who accorded for your participation.