Four tips for engaging patients and families in home monitoring
As nurses, we’d always rather be proactive than reactive. We don’t just want to wait for a phone call that something bad has happened to our patient. But in order to be proactive, we often need the help of our patients and their families, especially when home monitoring is part of the care plan.
In my last blog, I wrote about how parents’ engagement in home monitoring has been vital to the success of our Cardiac High Acuity Monitoring Program (CHAMP) for babies with single ventricle heart disease. I also discussed how treating parents as partners is our guiding principle for engaging them in using our CHAMP app during the high-risk period between their newborn’s first and second surgeries.
As promised, here are my top tips for how to foster partnerships with those you seek to engage in home monitoring based on what we’ve learned in our CHAMP program.
Foster two-way communication
We don’t just “tell” parents to use the CHAMP tools and send them on their way. We approach home-monitoring education as a two-way process. So we not only explain how to use the tools, we ask parents questions to understand what their life picture looks like. That way, we can tailor how we work with them depending on their specific needs.
For example, we see some families more in clinic because they can’t be as thorough with home monitoring due to their circumstances. Whereas, other parents want us to save them a trip to the emergency room by looking at a video of their baby at three a.m.
Whatever their needs, we make sure the families know they can always ask us for help.
Allow for some give and take
We never want parents to feel bad if they’re not keeping up with every single step of their home monitoring. We know they’re all doing the best they can and want the best for their child. They’re not always going to be 100 percent adherent and that’s okay.
If it feels like submitting three pieces of information each day is getting to be too much for them, I’ll narrow it down and ask them to send just one thing when they’re having a particularly tough day. And I help them understand that by doing so, I can take some pressure off their shoulders by helping to look after their baby using the information or video they share.
Provide positive reinforcement
If an alert is generated by our home-monitoring app, we contact families right away 24 hours/seven days a week. But even if there are no areas of concern, we send a weekly email to parents to provide them with an update. That way, they know we’re looking at the information they’re submitting—and it’s not just going into a vacuum. It reinforces that we’re a team working together to watch over their baby through this critical time.
Practice using the tools yourself
Prior to providing the CHAMP app to our patients’ parents, our team took it home along with a fake baby for a weekend and went through all the steps we’re asking parents to do. So when parents ask us which button to push to submit a video or question, we know because we’ve done it ourselves.
I hope the above tips help you to engage people—whether patients or patients’ families or both—to use the home monitoring tools you offer so that you can partner with them to improve their health and quality of life.
And please let the nurses’ blog team know if you have any questions or comments—or if you have your own patient or family engagement success story. You can reach them via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
