2260-PUB: Inpatient Diabetes Patient Brochure: What You Need to Know while You Are in the Hospital

Hospitalized patients with diabetes, whether previously on insulin or not, are generally treated with insulin. This change from outpatient medication, the type of insulin, and insulin regimen may be significantly different from what the patient is familiar with and may result in confusion, discomfort or even confrontation about the treatment plan. To ease the transition from outpatient to inpatient, we developed a “Brochure for Patients with Diabetes: What you need to know while you are in the hospital” to help make the patient feel more comfortable about the glycemic care they receive and improve patient satisfaction. The specific items covered in the brochure are: 1) Why the management of your diabetes may be quite different from what you usually do at home; 2) Goals for blood sugars (why different from home: fighting infections, avoiding hypoglycemia); 3) How we manage your blood sugar levels; 4) Blood sugar checks (how often); 5) Diet (restrictions, meals on demand); 6) Discharge planning; 7) Common questions such as use of own meter, reasons for different insulins, pumps, and CGM. The brochure is printed for the patient with the first time any insulin order set is ordered. The brochure is available in Spanish, Chinese and Russian.

Evaluation: We audited brochure distribution to determine percentage of patients who received the brochure and developed a survey to determine the patient’s understanding of the brochure.

Results: Audit results: After upgrades to the order sets so brochure would be printed, 100% of 50 charts had printed brochures. The survey: was hand delivered to 40 consecutive patients on insulin. 32 of the patients had ≧90% correct responses. The remaining 8 averaged 60% correct response.

Conclusion: We successfully produced a brochure that explains inpatient diabetes management to newly admitted patients. Whether the patients who had decreased understanding may have been too ill to completely understand the brochure and possible changes in patient satisfaction remain to be explored.