While you’re waiting, a waiting room-based, cardiovascular disease-focused educational program: protocol for a randomised controlled trial

Abstract

IntroductionPatients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) frequently attend outpatient clinics and spend a significant amount of time in waiting rooms. Currently, this time is poorly used. This study aims to investigate whether providing CVD and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) education to waiting patients in a cardiology clinic of a large referral hospital improves motivation to change health behaviours, CPR knowledge, behaviours and clinic satisfaction post clinic, and whether there is any impact on reported CVD lifestyle behaviours or relevant CPR outcomes at 30 days.Methods and analysisRandomised controlled trial with parallel design to be conducted among 330 patients in the waiting room of a chest pain clinic in a tertiary referral hospital. Intervention (n=220) participants will receive a tablet-delivered series of educational videos catered to self-reported topics of interest (physical activity, blood pressure, diet, medications, smoking and general health) and level of health knowledge. Control (n=110) participants will receive usual care. In a substudy, intervention participants will be randomised 1:1 to receive an extra video on CPR or no extra video. The primary outcome will be the proportion of intervention and control participants who report high motivation to improve physical activity, diet and blood pressure monitoring at end of clinic. The primary outcome of the CPR study will be confidence to perform CPR post clinic. Secondary analysis will examine impact on clinic satisfaction, lifestyle behaviours, CPR knowledge and willingness to perform CPR post clinic and at 30-day follow-up.Ethics and disseminationEthics approval has been received from the Western Sydney Local Health District Human Research Ethics Committee. All patients will provide informed consent via a tablet-based eConsent framework. Study results will be disseminated via the usual channels including peer-reviewed publications and presentations at national and international conferences.Trial registration numberANZCTR12618001725257.

Sustained Improvement in Patient Experience by Optimizing Patient Flow in Ambulatory Settings

“…Moreover, this process requires accurate time stamping at every step by the clinic staff. Recent studies seem to indicate that patient's perception of wait time is probably more important than the actual wait time (13,14). Creative strategies to fill patient's wait time seem to improve "wait time experience" without affecting the wait time.…”

“…Creative strategies to fill patient's wait time seem to improve "wait time experience" without affecting the wait time. We used educational video programs for the patients in the sub-waiting room as these types of measures have been reported to make patients feel that their time is not being wasted and improve wait time perception (14,15). "Degree to which you were informed of any delays" is another important question of the survey on "moving through your visit."…”

Do health service waiting areas contribute to the health literacy of consumers? A scoping review

“…Many different types and modes of delivering interventions have been trialled in waiting areas. The most frequent type was audio-visual health information delivered via a television monitor or tablet ( n = 19) ( Eubelen et al , 2011 ; Merck et al , 2012 ; Tingey et al , 2013 , 2014 ; Snead et al , 2014 ; Hellmers et al , 2016 ; Shah et al , 2016 ; Pereira et al , 2017 ; Alnasser et al , 2018 ; Berkhout et al , 2018b ; Dineley et al , 2018 ; McIntyre et al , 2018 , 2020a , b , 2021 ; Neumann et al , 2018 ; Ha et al , 2019 ; Lavaerts, 2019 ; McNab and Skapetis, 2019 ; Vangu et al , 2019 ; Aydin et al , 2021 ; Highland et al , 2021 ; Perera et al , 2021 ). The second type was interactive platforms (i.e.…”

Education on cardiac risk and CPR in cardiology clinic waiting rooms: a randomised clinical trial

“…The intervention was co-designed with patients, consumers, healthcare providers and researchers and is detailed elsewhere. 16 Briefly, 21 patients with CVD identified through a consumer organisation contributed to identifying appropriate video content for the intervention programme through rating videos on content utility and likelihood of motivating lifestyle change. Survey data from consumers on CPR confidence informed the sample size calculation for the trial.…”

“…Video selection occurred as previously described. 16 All videos were from reputable sources (including the Australian and British Heart foundations, Healthy WA, and the Better Health Channel) and did not contain advertisements.…”