You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Liver
Research
Patient understanding of liver cirrhosis and improvement using multimedia education
  1. Matthew A Goldsworthy1,
  2. Waleed Fateen1,2,
  3. Helene Thygesen3,
  4. Mark A Aldersley4,
  5. Ian A Rowe1,4,
  6. Rebecca L Jones4
  1. 1School of Medicine, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
  2. 2NIHR Digestive Diseases Biomedical Research Unit, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
  3. 3College of Health and Wellbeing, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
  4. 4Department of Hepatology, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Leeds, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Waleed Fateen, NIHR Nottingham Digestive Diseases Biomedical Research Unit, Queens Medical Centre, Derby Road, Nottingham NG7 2UH, UK; waleed.fateen{at}nottingham.ac.uk

Abstract

Objective For patients to engage with the long-term management of liver cirrhosis, sufficient understanding of their condition is essential. The aim of this study was to assess baseline patient knowledge and to test whether a condition-specific multimedia screencast could improve this.

Design Service quality improvement study.

Setting A UK tertiary liver centre. Patients were recruited during 12 general hepatology outpatient clinics.

Patients Fifty-two patients with liver cirrhosis were included. Sixty-two per cent were male; their median age was 56 years and their median clinic attendance period was 3 years.

Interventions Participants completed a baseline questionnaire assessing their knowledge of the management and complications of cirrhosis. They then watched a tailored screencast discussing this condition, which had been developed by expert hepatologists in collaboration with patient representatives. Knowledge was reassessed using a new copy of the original questionnaire after an interval of at least one month.

Main outcome measures Patient scores on knowledge questionnaires at baseline and follow-up.

Results Fifty-two patients achieved a median score of 25.0% before viewing the screencast. Thirty-five patients then completed a follow-up questionnaire after an interval period. The median questionnaire score in this group improved from 25.0% to 66.7%; an increase of 41.7% compared with baseline (p<0.001).

Conclusions Despite regular review at a specialist clinic, participants had poor baseline knowledge of liver cirrhosis. Delivering information by screencast led to a significant improvement. We therefore present an effective way to empower patients with accurate, up-to-date and retainable information that can easily be translated to many other conditions.

  • LIVER CIRRHOSIS

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/flgastro-2016-100761

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors MAG and WF conceived and designed the study; collected, analysed and interpreted the data; drafted the manuscript; approved the final version; and contributed equally. HT analysed and interpreted the data, critically revised the manuscript and approved the final version. MAA, IAR and RLJ designed the study, critically revised the manuscript and approved the final version.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.