An Educational and Skill-Building Intervention to Improve Symptom Recognition and Interpretation in Women With Acute Coronary Syndrome: A Pilot Study.
Leslie L Davis, Thomas P McCoy
PMID 30499790WHAT IT FOUND
Nine of 10 women completed a nurse-led ACS symptom education and skill-building program within about 55 days; all nine who completed rated it positively, and knowledge, attitudes and beliefs rose, but there was no control group.
Key findings
01Nine of the ten women enrolled completed all teaching and follow-up sessions and data collection.
02The nine completers were pleased with the intervention, with mean satisfaction 1.4 on a 4-point scale where 1 is strongly agree and 4 strongly disagree.
03Mean ACS knowledge rose from 76.2% to 83.6% (p = .056), symptom recognition attitudes rose from 8.2 to 9.7 (p = .020), and beliefs about expectations and actions rose from 19.9 to 22.6 (p = .012).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Only 10 women were enrolled and 9 completed, so the pilot cannot show that the intervention works or reduces delay. There was no control group, so changes in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and anxiety could have happened for other reasons. The same nurse delivered the intervention and collected the data, which may have influenced responses. The knowledge change was not statistically significant at the adjusted p < .05 threshold. Participants were English-speaking women from one cardiac center, so results may not apply broadly.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that the intervention reduces prehospital delay or improves heart outcomes. It was a single-group pilot with no control group, and it measured feasibility, acceptability, knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and anxiety rather than time to seek care.