Endocrine Abstracts

Background: In the modern day busy clinical practice the communication between patient/relative and care giver is at minimal level. The patients and relatives feel apprehensive when advised about the surgical/interventional treatment. In such situation they feel the need of detail information from the care givers which on many occasions is not available. Story telling is such a technique of health communication made out in common man language which can be made animated and interactive using virtual characters and can operate in a virtual environment eliminating the need of health professionals. We intended to study the efficacy of storytelling technique on patients undergoing Hemithyroidectomy for benign cytology.

Methods: A story of a lady (cartoon version) aged 25 years with a benign thyroid nodule who underwent uneventful Hemithyroidectomy is depicted in this movie including the history, clinical examination, investigations, counseling and the operative procedure and the running time of the animation movie is four minutes. For developing this movie, high end graphic computer work station and various multimedia authoring tools like Adobe Flash, Photoshop, Captivate, Maya and Final Cut Pro were used. The story was shown to patients with clinically solitary thyroid nodules who were provisional candidates for surgery in the outpatient department.The patients filled in the evaluation of Multimedia animation questionnaire at the time of discharge.

Result: 20 patients filled the questionnaire. 19 found the movie useful and their remaining questionnaire was analyzed. Mean age was 35.45±12.8 years.15 (75%) were females. All patients were euthyroid. The mean weight was 40.80±20.79 gm. The final histopathology was colloid in majority. In the questionnaire, the mean score for improved understanding of the disease was 73.9±14.7 (P=0.003), better organization of treatment was 78.6±13.1 (P=0.000), stimulated interest in the relatives was 70.8±15.8 and saved unnecessary discussion with the consultant was 55.5±7.8.

Conclusion: Story telling is a useful tool in health communication. With widespread availability of high speed internet and affordable mobile computing devices such kind of information can be of use to the patients and relatives in decision making and also saves valuable time of the treating consultant. Future studies with larger numbers are needed.