Chemotherapy education: standardizing education and improving knowledge retention through multimedia platform

Abstract

Patients with a new diagnosis of cancer undergoing chemotherapy treatment receive an overwhelming amount of information at the start of their journey. At a northcentral Montana healthcare agency, it was observed that patients were not retaining the chemotherapy education provided to them, which can negatively impact their timeliness of recognizing and reporting symptoms. The purpose of this project was to determine best practice, standardize the chemotherapy delivery process, and implement multimedia into chemotherapy education delivery in hopes of improving knowledge retention. A chemotherapy education checklist was developed to standardize the information delivered to patients during their chemotherapy education. Prior to their education, patients were asked to answer a seven-question pretest. Before their first day of treatment, patients followed a link to watch the Chemotherapy Basics video created by the Cleveland Clinic. On their first day of treatment, patients answered the same seven-question post-test and their scores were analyzed. Patients showed improvement in their post-test scores after the education intervention. The results of this project suggest that the addition of multimedia to the chemotherapy education process coupled with a standardized education checklist improves knowledge retention of patients.