Hospital nurses' comfort in and frequency of delivering heart failure self-care education.

Background: Nurses are expected to deliver pre-discharge heart failure education in 8 content areas: what heart failure means, medications, diet, activity, weight monitoring, fluid restriction, signs/symptoms of worsening condition and signs/symptoms of fluid overload.

Aims: To examine nurses' comfort in and frequency of delivering heart failure education to hospitalized patients.

Methods: A multicenter, descriptive, correlational design and questionnaire methods were used. General linear models were performed to assess associations of comfort in and frequency of delivering patient education after controlling for significant nurse characteristics.

Results: Of 118 nurses, mean age was 39 ± 11.6 years, 61.9% worked on cardiac units and 58.3% spent <15 min providing pre-discharge heart failure education. Comfort in delivering education was highest for weight monitoring and lowest for activity, and was associated with nurse age (p=0.019), years in profession (p=0.004) and minutes providing pre-discharge education (p=0.003). Frequency delivering education was highest for signs/symptoms of worsening condition (mean frequency, 71.5% ± 29%) and lowest for activity (42.7% ± 29.4%) and was associated with comfort in educating patients (all p<0.001); and pre-discharge education minutes, p<0.001. Using general linear modeling, minutes spent delivering pre-discharge education remained associated with overall comfort in (p=0.04) and frequency of (p<0.001) heart failure education delivery.

Conclusions: Nurses' comfort in and frequency of delivering education varied by heart failure self-care content area. Self-care education areas most important to survival and hospitalization had the lowest rates of nurse comfort and frequency. Systems and processes are needed to facilitate education delivery prior to hospital discharge.