Child to nurse communication in paediatric post-acute hospital care: evaluation of the VerbalCare tablet application

Abstract

VerbalCare is a mobile software platform for hospital patients and nursing staff to communicate in real-time. The purposes of this study were to (1) identify and evaluate icons for the VerbalCare tablet application and (2) examine use and satisfaction with this tablet application in a paediatric post-acute hospital. Hospital nursing staff were surveyed to identify the most common reasons children use the "nursing call bell". Icons for the VerbalCare tablet application were developed to match the identified call bell requests and be understood by children. Through structured interview, three children provided feedback on the icons. Following staff training, the system was implemented for five patients (8-18 years). Data on frequency of use, types and timing of requests were collected via the internal software. Satisfaction surveys were completed at discharge. The VerbalCare application was used most frequently to communicate the need to use the bathroom (24%) and the need to get something (21%). Request frequency was consistent across morning, afternoon and evening and the tablet was used 40% of available days. These results indicate that children in a paediatric post-acute care hospital were able to use a tablet application for communicating with their nurse and reported satisfaction with the experience. Implications for Rehabilitation The VerbalCare tablet application was developed to allow patients to convey specific messages to nursing staff who are not in the patient's room. Children of varying ages were able to use the VerbalCare tablet application to communicate varying messages to hospital nursing staff and were satisfied with its use.

Determinant factors in adopting mobile health application in healthcare by nurses

“…Several studies have reported that nurses use these applications to access evidence-based scientific knowledge, support evidence-based decision-making, enhance performance skills of nursing students, and for problem-based methods of teaching (Johansson et al 2013; Jindal et al 2018, Choi et al 2018; Thoma-Lurken et al 2019; Ferguson et al 2019). In addition, it is observed from the literature that these applications are used by nurses to support their daily workflow, data entry, birth data tracking and analysis, documentation practices, for the hospital Electronic Health Record (EHR), in order to facilitate documentation at the bedside, for integrated management of chronic conditions, for longitudinal health data, to manage data for the care of mothers, patient information management, personalization, to provide an easy input interface and various outputs for nursing records, and support documentation at the bedside by means of a user-centered approach [ 8 – 13 ]. Another considerable aspect for the use of mobile health applications by nurses is health promotion.…”

Adopting mobile health applications by nurses: a scoping review

“…Other findings show that one of the other uses of these applications is patient and data management (Table 1). Nurses use these programs to support their daily workflow, data entry, birth data tracking and analysis, documentation practices, for the hospital Electronic Health Record, to facilitate documentation at the bedside, for integrated management of chronic conditions, for longitudinal health data, to manage data for the care of mothers, patient information management, personalisation, to provide an easy input interface and various outputs for nursing records, and support documentation at the bedside by means of a user-centred approach (Supplemental Table 1) (Crowley et al, 2017;Choi et al, 2004Choi et al, , 2018Ferguson et al, 2019;Lehto et al, 2018;Rothstein et al, 2016).…”

Communication challenges between nurses and migrant paediatric patients

“…Such digital communication aids could help paediatric cancer patients identify and express their symptoms (Baggott et al., 2015). Additionally, the inclusion of icons in a tablet could enable children to communicate directly with nurses (Crowley et al., 2017). Apps and mobile devices often could be used as ‘icebreakers’ (Goenka, 2016), or be viewed as modern technology (Anttila et al., 2017).…”

“…To assist in such situations, a digital communication device tailored to the needs of patients could provide such support (e.g. in daily communication, at night or in unplanned encounters) (Day and Song, 2017; Crowley et al., 2017).…”