Patient education in nursing: Investigation the role of individual and organizational barriers

Patient education can made result in multiple positive outcomes for the patient such as increase of satisfaction, improved life quality, anxiety reduction, reduction of the emergence of disease complications and increase of participation in health care programs. The present study was conducted with the objective of determining the role of personal, organizational and instrumental barriers of patient education in nurses. This cross-sectional study was conducted on 300 nurses in medical-educational hospitals in the city of Kermanshah in the west of Iran, during 2014. The participants were selected using simple random sampling and with probability proportional to size and the information was collected using self-report questionnaire. The participants obtained 78.1, 56.5, 68.1 and 65.5% of the maximum obtainable score in the domains of management, individual and care, patient and their relatives and the overall score of patient education barriers, respectively. Barriers had a statistically significant inverse relationship with age in a way the barriers were reduced with the increase of age (r = -0.129, p = 0.042). Also, the barriers had a significant statistical relationship with place of service and the means score of the barriers was higher in the nurses in the internal medicine ward (p<0.05). The findings indicated the barriers related to the domain of management obtained higher scores. Therefore, it is recommended that, for improving patient education by the nurses, in addition to emphasis on individual domain, the correction of factors related to the domain of management as the second priority should be done by emphasis on related educational and instrumental strategies.