Nurses acting in reproductive medicine: improving patient performance on self- medication

Objective: Patients are increasingly anxious about the amount of information received regarding the drugs and their profile. As nurses can act as an important bridge between physician orders and patients, we designed a strategy to enroll them assisting patients with their daily fertility treatment injections.Methods: An exploratory survey was held by the clinicians and the nurse that resulted in a list of complaints pointing to anxiety concerning self-medication. Both groups were detecting patients characterized as insecure with medications and felt that something was needed to be done. In the second moment a nursing consultation was systematized in order to assist infertile patients with their daily fertility treatment injections. This consultation began being offered as a pilot in the clinical routine for couples who would start ART cycles. A questionnaire was introduced later to obtain feedback from nurse consultations.Results: There have been 41 accepted and scheduled appointments with 35 consultations that represented 85% of adherence. 24 patients received the questionnaire and 11 (46%) returned. 5 patients related having had problems handling medications previously. Two patients still had problems diluting drugs. Three patients experienced difficulties of finding correct needles, what caused extra distress. Concerning the way of administration patients indicated that they preferred the preloaded pens instead of manually injections with syringes. All questionnaires point that nurse consultation was clear and important and 5 out of 11 (45%) yielded an extra comment marking it as outstanding for their treatment.Conclusions: Our paper demonstrates that nurses can be involved more in ART treatments.