Background:Patients with newly diagnosed esophageal cancer often suffer from depression and anxiety due to limited oral intake and malnutrition, which affects their physical and emotional function, resulting in a decline in their quality of life. Patients have a high demand for self-care information in the early stages of diagnosis. However, getting large amounts of information in a short time often creates tremendous pressure for the patients. Coherent and comprehensive nursing guidance can increase the understanding of nursing guidance which further improvs patients’ self-care ability. Delayed examination or surgery, choking, or obstruction of the feeding route occur frequently on patients with esophageal cancer initially diagnosed in our unit. A team was established to improve the low nursing guidance completion rate (62.5%).
Purpose: To improve the completion rate of nursing guidance for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer patients from 62.5% to 97.5%.
Strategic procedure: Inadequate nursing knowledge, insufficient continuity of health education, and a lack of afterward follow-ups in delivering information are identified as main obstacles for medical providers. As for patients, main obstacles include massive information and interrupted or incomplete instruction due to family rotation. In addition, the inconsistent resources and content of the supplementary teaching materials needed to be carefully complied to meet the needs and a health education tracking system needed to be set up as well. As a result, specific strategies were developed to successfully decrease the rate of feeding route obstruction. The strategic procedures included consolidating in-service education, remodeling teaching materials, creating a useful pictorial calendar and work cards, making instructor videos, creating QR code links for teaching materials, and designing standardized education protocols and checklists.
Outcomes Evaluation: The completion rate of nursing guidance increased to 98.2%.
Conclusions: Coherent and comprehensive nursing guidance was created by integrating multiple nursing guidance tools and health education materials. In addition to improving patients’ disease awareness and self-care ability, the implementation of the guideline also improves medical satisfaction and the quality of care.