Estimating patient empowerment and nurses’ use of digital strategies: Esurvey study

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.