: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a serious public health problem, afflicting primarily the aged population. Among the aging, COPD causes significant morbidity and mortality, accounting for a huge disease burden with adverse consequences for patients, families, and the healthcare system. Due to the scarce availability and high expense of hospital-run pulmonary rehabilitation programs, primary care physicians generally encourage elderly patients to actively self-manage COPD. Unfortunately, the majority of primary care physicians are unable to provide sufficient education to elderly patients regarding COPD self-management, primarily due to limited time during routine medical evaluations. As a result, patients report widespread dissatisfaction with the COPD self-management educational information they are provided (5, 31). ? Older adults suffering from COPD have unique preferences for the manner in which they obtain self-management education, and it has been suggested that older COPD patients appreciate and learn well from home-based educational programs which use audiovisual media to transmit tailored self-management instruction (10, 18, 26, 45). In light of this, translational research must focus on disseminating innovative educational material which will utilize technology to provide underserved, diverse patients with customized educational resources which can 1) satisfy their informational needs regarding disease self-management and 2) enable skills and behaviors necessary to effectively self-manage chronic diseases such as COPD. Through editing clips of DVD audio and video technology designed by RVision(tm) (39) under a grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), we propose to provide underserved COPD patients of Choctaw Urgent Care, a Certified Federal Rural Health Clinic in Butler, Alabama, with tailored education regarding various COPD self-management skills. We propose to evaluate the effect of COPD self-management education dissemination strategy (DVD only vs. NHLBI educational pamphlet (40) only vs. both interventions concurrently) on outcomes such as common arterial blood oxygen saturation (SaO2 measure), self-reported health status (24), informational needs (31), and self-efficacy towards self-managing COPD (49). The study will be conducted with 72 total patients from Choctaw Urgent Care in a randomly assigned, pretest posttest design. Four groups of 18 patients will be provided with either tailored RVision(tm) DVDs, NHLBI ? educational pamphlets, both educational interventions concurrently, or usual patient education materials.
The specific aims of this study are to: i) assess the specific, self management learning needs of elderly COPD patients of a Certified Federal Rural Health Clinic; and ii) measure and compare the relative differences in objective lung function, self-reported health status, COPD informational needs and self-management self-efficacy between patients exposed to the a) edited RVision(tm) DVD clips, b) NHLBI educational pamphlets, c) RVision(tm) DVD clips and NHLBI educational pamphlets concurrently, or d) usual patient education (control). ? ? ?
| Stellefson, Michael; Chaney, Beth H; Chaney, J Don (2010) Using Exploratory Focus Groups to Inform the Development of Targeted COPD Self-Management Education DVDs for Rural Patients. Int J Telemed Appl 2010:450418 |
| Stellefson, Michael; Chaney, Beth H; Chaney, J Don (2009) Examining the efficacy of DVD technology compared to print-based material in COPD self-management education of rural patients. Calif J Health Promot 7:26-42 |
