Estimating Patient Empowerment and Nurses’ Use of Digital Strategies: eSurvey Study

Olga Navarro Martínez, Jorge Igual García and Vicente Traver Salcedo
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Olga Navarro Martínez: Department of Nursing, Catholic University of Valencia, 46007 Valencia, Spain
Jorge Igual García: Instituto de Telecomunicaciones y Aplicaciones Multimedia (ITEAM), Departamento de Comunicaciones, Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 Valencia, Spain
Vicente Traver Salcedo: Instituto ITACA, Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 Valencia, Spain

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 18, 1-16

Abstract: Patient empowerment is seen as the capability to understand health information and make decisions based on it. It is a competence that can improve self-care, adherence and overall health. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for information and has also reduced the number of visits to health centers. Nurses have had to adapt in order to continue offering quality care in different environments such as the digital world, but this entails assessing the level of their patients’ empowerment and adapting material and educational messages to new realities. The aim of this study is, on the one hand, to assess nurses’ use of digital resources to provide reinforcing information to their patients and, on the other hand, to evaluate how they assess the level of empowerment of their patients. To perform the study, 850 nurses answered 21 questions related to their own digital literacy and patients’ empowerment. The ability to make decisions is the characteristic most selected by nurses (70%) as useful in measuring patient empowerment, whereas 9.19% do not measure it in any way. Printed material is most often used by nurses to offer additional information to patients (71.93%), mobile applications are the least used option (21.58%), and elder nurses are those who most recommend digital resources. In this study, younger nurses make little or no use of technology as a resource for training and monitoring patients. In spite of some limitations concerning the study, digital health needs to be promoted as an indisputable tool in the nurse’s briefcase in the future to ensure that older patients can manage electronic resources in different fields.

Keywords: health literacy; digital literacy; digital skills; patient empowerment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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