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Enhancing communication skills for telehealth: development and implementation of a Teach-Back intervention for a national maternal and child health helpline in Australia

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Health Services Research, March 2018
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About this Attention Score

  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (85th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (81st percentile)

Mentioned by

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1 blog
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11 X users

Citations

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38 Dimensions

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214 Mendeley
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Title
Enhancing communication skills for telehealth: development and implementation of a Teach-Back intervention for a national maternal and child health helpline in Australia
Published in
BMC Health Services Research, March 2018
DOI 10.1186/s12913-018-2956-6
Pubmed ID
Authors

Suzanne Morony, Kristie Weir, Gregory Duncan, Janice Biggs, Don Nutbeam, Kirsten J. Mccaffery

Abstract

Telehealth professionals require advanced communication skills, in part to compensate for lack of visual cues. Teach-Back is a best practice communication technique that has been recommended but not previously evaluated for consumer telehealth. We aimed to implement Teach-Back at a national maternal and child health telephone helpline. We describe the intervention and report telenurse experiences learning to use Teach-Back. We identified barriers (time, knowledge, skills, beliefs) and enablers (self-reflection) to using Teach-Back, and developed a novel training program to address these, guided by the Theoretical Domains Framework. We engaged maternal and child health telenurses to participate in a "communication skills" study. The intervention had two key components: guided self-reflection and a Teach-Back skills workshop. For the duration of the 7-week study nurses completed brief online surveys following each call, reflecting on both the effectiveness of their communication and perceived caller understanding. At the end of each shift they reflected on what worked well. Teach-Back knowledge, skills, and beliefs were addressed in a 2-h workshop using videos, discussion, and role play. We explored nurses' experiences of the intervention in focus groups and interviews; and analysed transcripts and comments from the self-reflection surveys using the Framework method. This study forms part of a larger evaluation conducted in 2016. In total 16 nurses participated: 15 were trained in Teach-Back, and 13 participated in focus groups or interviews. All engaged with both self-reflection and Teach-Back, although to differing extents. Those who reported acquiring Teach-Back skills easily limited themselves to one or two Teach-Back phrases. Nurses reported that actively self-reflecting (including on what they did well) was useful both for developing Teach-Back skills and analysing effectiveness of the techniques. Most wanted more opportunity to learn how their colleagues manage Teach-Back in different situations, and more visual reminders to use Teach-Back. Our theory-informed intervention successfully enabled nurses to use Teach-Back. Guided self-reflection is a low-resource method aligned with nurse professional identity that can facilitate Teach-Back skills learning, and could also be applied to other advanced communication skills for telehealth. Listening to multiple workplace-specific examples of Teach-Back is recommended for future training. ACTRN12616000623493 Registered 15 May 2016. Retrospectively registered.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 11 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 214 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 214 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 26 12%
Student > Bachelor 20 9%
Student > Ph. D. Student 17 8%
Student > Doctoral Student 13 6%
Researcher 11 5%
Other 49 23%
Unknown 78 36%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Nursing and Health Professions 47 22%
Medicine and Dentistry 20 9%
Psychology 13 6%
Social Sciences 9 4%
Business, Management and Accounting 6 3%
Other 28 13%
Unknown 91 43%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 15. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 17 September 2018.
All research outputs
#2,409,666
of 24,858,211 outputs
Outputs from BMC Health Services Research
#989
of 8,408 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#50,158
of 337,954 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Health Services Research
#42
of 221 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 24,858,211 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 90th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 8,408 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 8.2. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 337,954 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 221 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 81% of its contemporaries.