Patient Stroke Education: Get the FAST Facts

Project Topic

Stroke education

Hospital Unit(s)

Intensive Care Unit (ICU)
Medical-Surgical Floor

CSI Participants

Deseree Baker, BSN, RN
Dawn Brefczynski, AAS, RN, CCRN
Sena Gilbert, CCC-SLP
Helen Graves, CCC-SLP
Rachel Osborn, AAS, RN
Sandy Scrase, AAS, RN

Project Goals/Objectives

1. To standardize stroke education and stroke education charting hospital-wide
2. To increase patient retention of provided stroke education to 75%
3. To increase patient satisfaction with stroke education received from 40% to 75%

Project Outcomes

1. Increased standardization of stroke education by creating a toolkit and simplifying RN charting
2. Increased charted stroke education to over 80%
3. Increased charted education materials provided to patients to over 80%
4. Increased patient retention of received stroke education to almost 90%
5. Increased patient satisfaction with stroke education 115% (from 40% percent 86%

Project Overview

In 2018, stroke was the fifth most frequent admitting diagnosis-related group for our ICU admissions and seventh hospital-wide. Our stroke committee had been working hard on improving practices according to American Heart Association’s (AHA’s) “Get with the Guidelines–Stroke” in-hospital program and was hoping to become a certified stroke center in the future. Our Patient Education department decided to take a detailed look at the education provided to stroke patients, with the goal of ensuring patients receive what they need as part of AHA’s recommended stroke quality measures.

Our CSI team surveyed nurses about where they charted, what materials they were handing out and how they thought we could improve stroke education. We also surveyed discharged patients to see how much information they retained and if they were satisfied with their stroke education in the hospital. The team created a stroke education toolkit for patients and a checklist for our nurses, and simplified stroke education charting to make it user-friendly with wording that matched the toolkit.. We introduced the new materials and charting changes during our hospital-wide skills fair as well as through one-on-one teaching by our nursing clinical educators.

We then monitored results monthly through chart audits and post-discharge patient surveys. To encourage adoption of the changes, we provided incentive prizes and recognition to those nurses who utilized the toolkit and charted 100% of the recommended stroke education and materials.

Throughout our six months of data collection we exceeded our goals, including increasing our patient satisfaction from 40% to 86%. In an effort to address some education barriers, we initiated translating our primary education handout “FAST Facts” into Russian and Spanish. To proactively address primary stroke prevention, we had the ICU and the Emergency department begin distributing the “FAST Facts” handout to at-risk patients. We also identified other hospital locations with a need for stroke prevention education, including the cardiology clinic and our sister primary care clinic.