Dr Wee Meng Han1, Ms Jolene Loh, Dr Chengsi Ong
1KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Singapore
Biography:
Wee Meng is currently a Senior Principal Dietitian and Head of Department of Nutrition & Dietetics and concurrently Deputy Director of Allied Health Office, overseeing Governance, Safety and Research. She has spent more than 20 years at KK Women's and Children's Hospital and is keen in promoting healthy nutrition habits from early childhood. She also drives and promotes professional matters as one of the co-chairs of the national Dietetics panel.
Abstract:
Pre-consultation questionnaires are increasingly used to gather patient information prior to consultations to improve the efficiency and quality of interactions. Time taken to obtain a diet history is dependent on the respondent’s memory and the level of details required. To reduce the time taken during consultation, an online pre-consultation diet history tool was introduced in our clinic. This is a report on the dietitians’ experiences with the tool.
A semi-qualitative interviewer-administered survey was conducted amongst dietitians who had experienced the tool (n=11). Satisfaction, usefulness, importance of the tool was rated using 7-point Likert scale. Additional open-ended feedback on the tool was obtained. Quantitative data was summarized using descriptive statistics.
The total patient response rate was 36%; common reasons for non-completion included no time, forgot and technical errors. While 64% of dietitians found the tool to be useful, less than half of them were satisfied with the tool. The main barriers to the usefulness of the tool were related to system slowness and laborious effort for information transfer. Almost all dietitians felt the tool increased efficiency by providing an idea of patients’ dietary intake beforehand, hence enabled time to focus on interventions. Time reduction was perceived to be 5-10 minutes per consultation.
Dietitians perceived a pre-consultation diet history tool to be useful, although the utility could be influenced by the lack of integration into the systems and the genericity of the questions. To improve its use, further development is necessary to enhance system efficiency and tool customizability.