Endocrine Abstracts

Adrenal insufficiency is a rare adrenal disorder that can be made more complicated by an adrenal crisis even to a life-threatening situation. An adrenal crisis occurs when the body has a shortage of the hormone cortisol. If the patient does not receive the correct treatment an adrenal crisis can be fatal. This can be avoided by correctly and carefully following the ‘stress instructions’ (also known as ‘sick day rules’). A significant percentage of patients have insufficient knowledge of these stress instructions or are not able to put them into practice themselves. In addition, it has become evident that the stress instructions vary between the different hospitals. For that reason, AdrenalNET has drawn up uniform stress instructions. These form part of the Quality of Care Standard for Adrenal Disorders, which sets out quality criteria (as applicable in the Netherlands) for the care of patients with adrenal insufficiency. One important quality criterion for the proper care of patients with adrenal insufficiency is that the hospital must have a nurse who has successfully completed this training course.

Objective: The objective of this training course is to offer nurses the essential theoretical and practical knowledge that they need if they are to provide adrenal patients with optimum care and instruct them how to apply the stress instructions for themselves. Indirectly, this will also help to promote the principle of co-management when patients with adrenal insufficiency find themselves in stressful situations. We are, in fact, training the trainers first via e-learning modules (4×) later one day at the university incl. a test at the end.