The effectiveness of an evidence-based health education program for parents of children undergoing congenital heart disease (CHD) surgery in Vietnam: A pilot study.

The intervention is a evidence-based health education program which includes five training sessions with support of parent hard copy resources. Parents in the intervention group will receive standard care, which will be subsequently described in the next question and additional health education from this program. First, parents will receive general disease specific knowledge in a face-to-face training session on the day of their child's admission (Week 1), which lasts approximately 100 minutes in a predicted group size from 4-5 parents. One week after surgery (Week 2), a one-on-one bedside training session will provide these parents with recommended disease specific management behaviours, for example common medications that their children will be discharged on, the recognition of deterioration and nutritional needs. This session is about 30-45 minutes long. Two weeks after surgery (Week 3), parents will receive the second one-on-one bedside training session which is the same as in the first one with different topics such as prevention of infective endocarditis and wound care. Two weeks after hospital discharge (Week 5 or Week 6), parents will be provided with the first 20-minute one-on-one follow-up training session focusing on medication adherence, signs of deterioration and nutritional needs. The session may be implemented via in-person interactions if the parents take their child to outpatient appointments after surgery. Alternatively, it can be via phone calls if they do not attend their child's outpatient appointment. Finally, at six weeks after discharge (Week 9 or Week 10), the process will be the same as two weeks after discharge, which was previously described. The teach-back health education method will be applied for all one-on-one training sessions to promote parents' comprehension of given knowledge. Parent hard copy resources are developed to support health education by the principal researcher and reviewed by the supervisory team. Parents will be provided with these resources at the face-to-face group training session for their review during hospitalisation and at home. The principal researcher, who is also a nursing staff in the Heart Center, the research setting, will provide health education to intervention group parents. A health education checklist is designed to ensure the intervention fidelity. The checklist includes a list of key knowledge elements that guide the principal researcher to focus on in each session. Elements that are delivered to parents will be ticked in the appropriate boxes while elements that have not been provided will be noted to inform subsequent training sessions. The use of checklist will also facilitate the principal researcher to provide an equal education intervention for each parent.