Patient education in cardiac surgery is complicated by the fact that cardiac surgery patients meet a lot of different health care providers. Little is known about education processes in terms of interdisciplinary tuning. In this study, complete series of consecutive preoperative consultations of 51 cardiac surgery patients with different health care providers (physicians, nurses and health educators) were videotaped. The information exchange between patients and providers was analyzed directly from the video recordings by using an adaptation of the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS) and a checklist of relevant informational topics. Results pointed to overlaps and gaps as well as to a lack of a patient-centered approach. The physicians were mostly overlapped by the nurses, who spent almost 30% of the time on talking about medical issues. Gaps were found in giving psycho-educational information and emotional support, needed to establish effective patient education. The findings provided a sound basis for developing guidelines and changes in the organization of the education process.
Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.