ER patients often don’t grasp discharge orders

Patients often fail to fully comprehend the treatment they receive during an emergency department visit or recall instructions for their care after they leave, new research suggests.
More often than not, these patients aren’t even aware that they have not understood what transpired or remembered what they were told, the investigators note in their study, published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
To shed more light on the communication process that occurs in this setting, Dr. Kirsten G. Engel at Northwestern University in Chicago and colleagues interviewed 140 adult English-speaking patients or their primary caregivers after discharge from emergency departments at two teaching hospitals.

read_more: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL25950620080722