Improving Discharge Medication Education: Consideration of Health Literacy and Language.

Background and objectives: Medication errors occur frequently to children after recent hospital discharge, with known risk factors of medical complexity, low parental literacy, and parental preferred language other than English (LOE). Focus groups with parents of children with medical complexity at our hospital identified our discharge medication list as needing improvement. Therefore, our team set out to provide a low health literacy, language-concordant discharge medication adherence aid (MAA) to more than 95% of patients discharging from our acute care cardiology unit (ACCU).

Methods: We formed a multidisciplinary group and developed an intervention whereby each patient's bedside nurse would generate a low health literacy, language-concordant discharge MAA and assessed the weekly average of patients discharged with an MAA in their preferred language via medical record review as our primary outcome measure, with subset analysis of MAA provision by preferred language to monitor implementation. Statistical process control charts were used to assess the impact of interventions over time.

Results: During the intervention, the weekly average of patients discharged with an MAA increased from a baseline of 21% in May 2022 to 75% and was sustained from July 2022 through October 2023. There was comparable percentage of LOE patients (76%; 94 of 123) to English-preferred patients (74%; 459 of 622) who received a discharge MAA.

Conclusions: Over a 6-month period, we implemented a language-concordant and patient-friendly MAA for 75% of discharging families from the ACCU. Piloting the intervention first with a small group of nurses improved our success during both the intervention and sustainability period.