Sepsis Patient Education: Perspectives from Home Health Nurses and Knowledge among Sepsis Survivors - The Surviving Sepsis Campaign emphasizes the critical need to provide sepsis survivors with patient education tailored to their self-care management after hospital discharge. This includes education on their diagnosis, treatment, infection prevention, early recognition, timely treatment of infection, and post-sepsis syndrome management. Many sepsis survivors are unaware of their diagnosis or its implications for self-care after discharge, leading to knowledge gaps that contribute to delayed follow-up care, poor health outcomes, and frequent rehospitalizations. Sepsis survivors often face long-term morbidity symptoms and are twice as likely to be rehospitalized within 30 days of discharge compared to the general inpatient population. Most of these rehospitalizations are due to new or recurring sepsis or infection and are considered preventable through early post-discharge self-care. Home health care (HHC) offers a key opportunity for delivering sepsis patient education, as 13.1% of Medicare sepsis survivors are discharged to HHC. According to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, patient education is a vital part of HHC, and preliminary findings from a qualitative study suggest that acute care clinicians believe sepsis patient education would be better facilitated within HHC rather than in the hospital setting. However, sepsis survivors discharged to HHC experience higher 30-day rehospitalization rates than those discharged to skilled nursing facilities. Since HHC does not provide continuous patient monitoring, high-quality and personalized patient education is essential to help survivors recognize symptoms and seek timely care. Despite this, little is known about sepsis patient education within HHC and how prepared survivors feel to manage their recovery. This qualitative descriptive study will generate foundational knowledge on sepsis patient education in HHC to inform future interventions aimed at improving self-care among sepsis survivors. The specific aims are: 1) to characterize the self-care self-efficacy and knowledge regarding sepsis and its aftercare among recent hospital discharges receiving HHC; 2) to identify the materials, content, mode of delivery, facilitators, barriers, and strategies used by HHC nurses in delivering sepsis patient education; and 3) to describe the barriers and facilitators influencing the receipt and understanding of sepsis aftercare among survivors within HHC. This fellowship provides opportunities to enhance knowledge of current patient education interventions, develop expertise on sepsis survivor health outcomes, apply rigorous qualitative methods, and advance my independent research program. This study addresses the NINR research lens on Systems and Models of Care, which “focuses on how healthcare and health services are delivered.”
