Furey Educates Patients, Nurses in New Roles

Patient education is an important component for delivering high quality patient care. The Institute of Medicine 2004 report stated that more than 90 million people do not understand the health information given to them. With this in mind, Ann Furey, RN, MS takes her new role as program coordinator of Patient and Family Education very seriously. Furey has been charged with building a health promotion and education program at BWH that is based on best practice and grounded in evidence-based research. She is working towards more complete and consistent distribution of hundreds of education materials currently given to ambulatory and inpatients specific to their illness.

“I want to serve as a resource to all clinical areas, both inpatient and ambulatory, and to assist them in obtaining or creating appropriate patient education materials, as well as to coordinate with the Kessler library on using existing resources most effectively,” she said.

Improving the health literacy of the patient population is also important to Furey. “I want to ensure that patient education materials are readable and culturally appropriate,” she said. Furey would like to find ways to enhance the patient education effort using multimedia.