Co-design of a patient/caregiver discharge communication tool for emergency practice settings

Most people who visit an emergency department will be discharged home at the end of their visit with information on how to manage their care at home. Good communication between healthcare providers and patients or their caregivers is critical to ensure important information is shared and understood throughout the emergency department stay. However, patients and/or caregivers often leave the emergency department without receiving or understanding all of the information required to achieve optimal health. To date, strategies to improve discharge communication in emergency departments have primarily targeted patients and/or caregivers with minimal consideration of the environment in which the communication occurs. Further, patients and/or caregivers have rarely, if ever, been involved in the design or evaluation of discharge communication tools prior to implementation. According to the Institute of Medicine, health literate organizations assess barriers to information exchange and enable people to access and use health information and services. Our service partners are committed to the involvement of patients and families in the design, implementation and evaluation of health services. Our team of patients, caregivers, clinicians and researchers have used a theory-based co-design approach to develop a patient managed communication tool to improve recall and comprehension of important discharge information shared during an emergency department visit. The aim of our project is to evaluate our communication tool to determine its usability and acceptability by patients, caregivers and emergency department healthcare providers. We will use our findings to refine the communication tool and develop an implementation plan for a future multi-site trial with emergency departments across Canada.