Follow Up Phone Teaching

Patient Teaching: The Follow Up Phone Call

Ebenezer Queen

University of Pittsburgh

School of Nursing

Patient Teaching: The Follow Up Phone Call Many people believe that patient care ends once the patient is discharged and has left the hospital. Patient teaching can help enhance the effectiveness of the care that has already been given by ensure the patient understands their role in the partnership that is their care. It can help decrease hospital readmissions, cost of continued care, and help the patient heal more effectively. Inadequate patient teaching can cause patient noncompliance. This can cause infective medication use (from the patient not knowing when or how to take medications), reoccurring infections (from the patient not knowing how to clean themselves or do proper wound care), or it can even cause death (from a patient not knowing when to alert a healthcare professional due to symptoms that could indicate something lethal). There are many ways to enact patient teaching and ensure patient compliance. One of these ways is to have a follow up phone call some time after a patient has been discharged. It can ensure that the patient is following the

The study could not find a large variety of sources that studied telephone follow-ups. I believe that future research in the effects of timing of phone calls could be beneficial. Also, research that could quantify what defines the effective aspects of a patient follow up telephone call immensely improve our ability to assess the effectiveness of follow-up calls on patient teaching. Although, the literature could not find many studies on the benefits of telephone follow-ups its benefit was evident and its potential to evolve into a definitive asset for patient teaching and