| Sumario: | Significance & Background: The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is an NCI-designated cancer center and the Renal Melanoma department treats -622 patients annually. Before initiating treatment, patients attend in-person nursing education visits to review potential side effects of their infusion therapy. Education visits are often scheduled to occur shortly before or on the same day as the first infusion. When scheduled on the day of infusion, these visits often lead to a patient feeling unprepared and contribute to patient fatigue due to the large number of visits on a single day. However, when these visits are scheduled 1-3 days in advance of the infusion day, attending in-person may present logistical challenges and frustration for patients travelling from longer distances. Purpose: The objective is to share the implementation and evaluation of the feasibility and impact of telehealth on pre-treatment teaching and patient experience. Interventions: An intervention was designed to pilot a six-month nursing education telehealth program for patients initiating infusion immunotherapy. Post-telehealth visit surveys were distributed to patients (n=75) to assess satisfaction, preferences, and perceived preparedness. Nurses (n=6) and providers (n=5) were also surveyed to evaluate patient readiness and identify any clinical concerns related to the telehealth format. Results: Telehealth nursing education visits were well received by patients and staff, offering a flexible and effective alternative to in-person appointments. Among patient respondents, 54% preferred telehealth, 17% preferred in-clinic visits, and 29% had no preference. Notably, 88% reported feeling well-prepared for their first infusion following the telehealth session. Feedback from clinical staff indicated that patients were engaged during the telehealth visits and observed no negative impact to patient readiness when using tele-health versus in-person visits. Discussion: Based on these findings, our clinic has adopted telehealth visits as a standard recommended option for pre-infusion nursing education visits. However, some nurses expressed dissatisfaction with the decreased in-person patient interactions as a result of telehealth. There were also some challenges in allocating appropriate clinic spaces to conduct telehealth visits, which is an ongoing problem with increasing patient populations. Nevertheless, our pilot overall finds telehealth to be an effective way to educate patients and has mitigated some of the fatigue and frustration for patients preparing to initiate treatment.
|
|---|