Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Research Article

Patient Strength of Preference for Best Practices in Patient Education

Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

*Corresponding Author:

Rachel Walsh
Family Medicine Teaching Unit, The Scarborough Hospital
3000 Lawrence Ave E, Scarborough, Ontario, M1P 2V5, Canada
Tel: + 416-431-8200
E-mail: rfeld011@gmail.com

Received date: October 21, 2016; Accepted date: November 10, 2016; Published date: November 20, 2015

Citation: Walsh R, Aliarzadeh B, Mastrogiacomo C (2016) Patient Strength of Preference for Best Practices in Patient Education. J Community Med Health Educ 6:484. doi:10.4172/2161-0711.1000484

Copyright: © 2016 Walsh R, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Background: Patient education is important in healthcare. As such, EULAR, the European League Against Rheumatism, has created and published 8 evidence-based and expert-opinion-based recommendations for patient education. However, the relevance and relative importance of these recommendations to a general patient population are yet to be determined. Our study aimed to determine patients’ strength of preference for the different EULAR recommendations for patient education.
Methods: We performed an adaptive, partial-profile conjoint analysis using a discrete choice survey on a crosssection of patients in a family practice. Results: A total 56.8% of patients approached in clinic agreed to participate. Of those who started the survey, 94.4% completed the survey. The mean time to complete the survey was 10.7 minutes. Mean rankings of the 8 EULAR recommendations, where 1 is the most preferred and 8 the least preferred, were 3.4 for content of education, 3.9 for training of education providers, 4.1 for who delivers the education, 4.5 for education methods offered, 4.6 for how often the education should be offered, 4.9 for accessibility of education, 5.3 for level of personalization, and 5.4 for monitoring of education.
Conclusion: Participants felt that the most important features were content, training of education providers, and who delivered the education. The level of personalization and the monitoring of the education were deemed less important. In addition, we determined that it is feasible to measure patient preferences using a discrete choice survey in a family practice setting.

Keywords