CREATING A NEURO-PATIENT RESOURCE CENTRE

Informed families are better prepared to make healthcare decisions and to carry through on them. Most families rely on their healthcare professionals to not only explain the specifics of their child's problem but also to point them to sources of relevant information. A Neuro-Patient Resource Centre can work with members the healthcare team to provide families with resources they need. This will help families become better informed, to ask more informed questions and to provide better care of the child. This may result in a reduction of consultation time and improve the institution's ability to meet accreditation criteria on patient education and information..

What can a Neuro-Patient Resource Centre NPRC do in a pediatric environment?

It can provide current, authoritative, quality consumer health information on varied literacy levels in various languages and formats. A NPRC can identify sources of quality consumer health information on line and provide links to these through the NPRC website as well providing full text access to in-house publications and patient education materials. A centre can provide patients with training to identify relevant, quality consumer health information.

Topics included are diagnostic tests, diseases and disorders, treatment information both medical and surgical, caretaking, health promotion, coping, palliation and grieving. A resource centre can act as referral services for resources in the healthcare environment and in the community. The staff may work with hospital health professionals to produce and distribute patient education documents.

Steps to establishing a resource centre include a needs assessment, determining where the Centre will fit into the institution, deciding on staffing, developing a budget and identifying sources of funding, forming partnerships with present resources in the institution and the community, establishing a powerful Advisory Board and developing a marketing plan.