Posted on December 6, 2001 at 11:50 a.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — A team of nurses at UAB Hospital has received a $50,000 award from the University Health System Consortium to study whether hand-held technology will smooth their patients' discharge from the hospital.

Just four of 67 entrants nationwide were given awards. UAB's team is led by Cynthia Barginere, RN, MSN, executive associate director at UAB Hospital. Other team members are Donna Lawson, MSHA, MBA, and Dianne Richmond, RN, MSN.

The UAB team will conduct a pilot study to determine whether the use of hand-held technology will help in the day-to-day process of educating patients at the bedside and preparing them to care for themselves after their hospital stay.

"Nurses begin teaching the patient about their care and preparing them for discharge the day they come in," Barginere says. Standardized written materials are used for patient education, Barginere notes, but they are often kept at the nurses' station, away from the patient's room. "It slows down the process if a nurse has to keep returning to the nurses' station," Barginere says. "The hand-held devices allow the nurse to have patient education information at her fingertips."

Beginning in January, palm pilots will be distributed to 8 to 10 nurses on one patient care unit. At the conclusion of the study in August, the researchers will use patient satisfaction scores to determine if patients benefited from the project.

"Our goal is to improve patient education, but also to improve our practice of nursing care," Barginere says. "We felt the hand-held technology was a tool that was underutilized."