Patient-Paced Discharge Education

How might we improve postpartum patient education so that it’s easier to understand and deliver?

Poor quality discharge education is associated with more newborn Emergency Room and Urgent Care visits. But short hospital stays limit the time for clinicals staff to effectively address a new mother’s learning needs, especially given the large amount of mandated education required by various agencies. Patient satisfaction scores for the Family Birthing Center (FBC) suggested significant gaps in patient readiness to succeed at home after giving birth.

Citing a need to improve its patient discharge education, the FBC Quality Improvement team identified several aspects of patient education as needing attention. These include: refining patient education materials; establishing a consistent education process that begins at admission; improving and standardizing the quality of patient education provided by nurses; improving coordination & communication within care team members, & between care team members & patients.

We led a 9-week design sprint to engage patients and staff in development of a more coordinated and effective patient-centered discharge education experience. We engaged 63 stakeholders, including obstetricians, postpartum patients, nurses, midwives, pediatricians, lactation consultants, community health workers, social workers, patient care managers, and clinical educators.​

We developed a framework to organize patient education into discrete challenges — Content development, Delivery improvement, and Team Coordination. — and built design requirements for each component.

The design requirements for each component are as follows:

Content that is

• Organized and easy for patients to understand

• Patient-paced so patient have an active role in their own learning

• Consistent so that all patients are taught the same core topics

Delivery that is

• Scripted to support staff in providing consistent key messages

• Timed to the middle of the hospital stay, rather than at day of discharge

• Delivered with confidence to create better educational outcomes

Coordinated and visual so that

• All stakeholders can see the patient’s progress when they walk in the room

• All stakeholders can track the patient’s self-assessed confidence with topics

All solutions were prototyped and tested in the clinical environment with patients and providers. Solutions are in use, in routine care as of July 1, 2025.

To develop testable solutions, we identified and structured 36 topics that needed to be covered before a patient went home. We then prototyped concepts to address each framework component, but work together as a communication system:

1. A Patient Education “Menu” (Content);

2. Educational Pathways for each of the 36 topics that include key messages and a “hook” for engaging patients and a suite of implementation support tools (Delivery);

3. An in-room whiteboard with education topics, visible from the bed and the door (Coordination).