Animation program used to encourage patients or family members to take an active role for eliminating wrong-site, wrong-person, wrong-procedure surgeries: Preliminary evaluation

Background: Wrong-site surgeries (including wrong-site, wrong-person and wrong-procedure errors) remain the number one problem among adverse events of health care delivery. Patients and/or family members should be involved when possible to help prevent such errors. Aims: 1) Design an educational animation program about patient safety for patients and/or family members to help eliminate wrong-site surgery errors. 2) Evaluate its educational effect. Methods: The animation developed for this study includes an introduction, hypothetical story, and guided information, and was presented at a tertiary medical center in northern Taiwan. A single-group pretest and posttest design was used. Results: Forty-six patients and 48 family members participated in the study. The pre-training score was 3.6 (on a scale of 1-4). After watching the animation, there was no significant increase (0.08 ± 0.5) for the patient group, but the family member group showed significant improvement (0.21 ± 0.6, P = .0309). Most participants (98.9%) were satisfied with the animation. Conclusion: The majority of participants reported good practices for avoiding wrong-site surgery mistakes before an operation. A significant improvement of post-training scores in the family member group was seen. The high satisfaction rating given by the participants after seeing the animation indicates that it was generally acceptable.