Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting
Date Submitted: Dec 29, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 29, 2020 - Feb 23, 2021
Date Accepted: Apr 21, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Implementation of iPads to Increase Compliance with Delivery of New Parent Education in the Mother/Baby Unit: A Retrospective Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Abusive Head Trauma (AHT) is a serious health problem affecting more than 3,000 infants annually in the US. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that healthcare providers counsel new parents about the dangers of AHT. Previous studies demonstrate that parental education is effective at reducing AHT events. South Carolina (SC) law requires hospitals to offer all new parents with the opportunity to watch an educational video about AHT. This mandate is addressed in different ways at the several delivery centers within a large SC healthcare system with a range of viewing methods utilized, from DVD players to mobile workstations to personal devices. Frequent technical barriers and workflow inefficiencies resulted in low rates of compliance with this mandate at several campuses. To improve compliance of parent viewing of this educational video, the healthcare system standardized video viewing protocol across all campuses by implementing the use of iPads for parental education. Existing literature suggests that patient education can be improved in the hospital setting by utilizing tablet computers, but our literature search identified a gap in research around the education of parents and caregivers during hospitalization for childbirth. We used the implementation of an iPad-based parental education delivery protocol to evaluate whether tablet computers can improve compliance with delivering new parent education in the hospital setting.
Objective:
To evaluate whether the standardized use of iPads to deliver education in the Mother/Baby unit resulted in improved rates of parents’ acceptance of the opportunity to view an educational video about AHT.
Methods:
We interviewed physicians and nurses to determine what previous protocols were in place to educate new parents before a standardized iPad-based protocol was implemented across six campuses of a large SC healthcare system. A retrospective study was conducted by review of 5,231 records from across the six campuses to determine the pre- and post-intervention compliance rates of viewing the AHT educational video to parents in the Mother/Baby unit.
Results:
Compliance increased overall (P<.001) across sites from an average of 41.93% (standard deviation of 46.24) to 99.73% (standard deviation of 0.26) (φ = .510). Four out of six locations saw a significant increase in compliance rates after introducing the iPad intervention (P <.001). The remaining two locations that showed no significant difference—both had very high rates of pre-intervention compliance.
Conclusions:
Following the implementation of a standardized iPad-based protocol to deliver new parent education, there was significant improvement in the percentage of new parents who viewed an educational video about AHT in the Mother/Baby unit. Based on these results, other healthcare providers should consider iPads to be a feasible and effective method for delivering hospital-based education to families in the Mother/Baby unit.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.