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

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.

Transferring Healthcare Professional’s Digital Competencies to the Workplace and Patients: A Pilot Study

“…More than 50% of professionals over 30 use what they learned in the course every day compared to 6.66% of the youngest professionals. These data could reaffirm what other studies have suggested; nurses and younger healthcare professionals use fewer digital resources with their patients [ 3 , 29 ]. As reported by these studies, this could be due, in the case of nurses, to a generation gap or to a lack of training received by younger nurses during their undergraduate studies.…”

“…Few healthcare professionals generate digital resources such as videos, blogs, infographics, and podcasts [ 3 ]. However, they are powerful tools for the follow-up of people with chronic pathologies [ 4 ], which can be a privileged scenario to understand better the needs and interests of people.…”

Promoting Health Education through Mobile Apps: A Quantitative Analysis of American Hospitals

“…To efficiently promote mobile apps as a health education tool, hospitals need to train doctors, nurses, and patients on how to use these platforms for educational purposes [ 35 ]. Thanks to mobile apps, doctors can interact more often with patients, especially with those suffering from chronic diseases [ 37 ], and nurses can monitor patients’ medical outcomes more efficiently [ 38 ]. On the other hand, patients using mobile apps become more autonomous and participate more actively in collective decision-making processes concerning their health, which positively influences their medical outcomes [ 35 ].…”

Effectiveness of a comprehensive tele-empowerment programme on self-care behaviours, uncertainty and readmission of patients with heart failure: protocol for a randomised controlled trial

“…The nurses’ professional expertise and their close relationship with patients make them responsible for educating patients to develop a suitable lifestyle and empowering them through various methods. This is especially the case for the ones suffering from chronic diseases 21…”