A new series of nutrition education videos, funded by the RBWH Foundation, is transforming the way statewide hospital patients learn about eating well after illness and injury.
The project was led by Surgical, Treatment and Rehabilitation Service (STARS) Dietitian researcher Hannah Olufson, in collaboration with a co-design team of dietitian researchers, consumer researchers and clinical staff.
“Consumers felt really strongly that although hospitals have adequate written information, it was often left at a patient’s bedside or lost among other forms patients receive during their hospital journey,” said Hannah Olufson.
“They recommended a video that patients could rewatch or share with their family members.”
Pictured left:
Front row left to right: Huyen Do (Dietitian, STARS), Dr Adrienne Young (Dietitian, RBWH), Bridget Nobel (Consumer Partner), Dale Trevor (Consumer Partner), Thilini Gunawardena (Dietitian RBWH), Janette Moore (Consumer Partner)
Back row left to right: Hannah Olufson (Dietitian, STARS), Dale Trevor (Consumer Partner), Scott Harding (Consumer Partner).
Input from consumer partnerss, including patients and caregivers, and hospital staff ensured the nutrition information was easy to understand, relevant to patients and able to be translated into different languages.
Team member Bridget Noble became involved in co-design after her husband John suffered a stroke and experienced aphasia, a language disorder that affects the ability to speak and understand what others say.
Her perspective as John’s caregiver ensured the videos used simple language and graphics.
“It's been a very interesting discovery journey, we call John’s experience our stroke of genius,” said Bridget Noble.
“It gave us purpose and gave us an opportunity to work with people to inspire them, because if you build something for aphasia, you build something for all cultures as it provides information slowly and simply.”
The topics of the three videos are “Eating When it is Harder to Eat”, “Eating for Recovery, Health and Wellness”, and “Eating for Stroke Prevention”. Testing revealed most patients (60%) who piloted the videos learned something new, while 27% reported that the videos reinforced their existing knowledge.
The videos are now available, statewide, on the Nutrition Education Materials Online Website under the new 'Nutrition Information Videos' tile. Click here to watch.
They will now be translated into the top 10 most spoken languages across Metro North.
In a Queensland-first, the videos have been integrated into the STARS bedside Patient Engagement System and paved the way for other clinical staff to upload educational videos to the system.
“We're really thankful to the RBWH Foundation for funding the videos, as it allowed me time away from clinical duties to co-ordinate this amazing project with our team,” said Hannah.
“A lot of other funding bodies fund research, whereas we wanted to translate research into practise, not necessarily create anything new.”
The team has also shared their co-design roadmap to assist other healthcare teams create high-quality, patient-centred education materials in the future.
