Concept of the quality of the educational services in cardiac rehabilitation

Achieving quality educational services is one of the current health system challenges; and nurses have a great role in this regard. Although quality educational services are a complex concept; so it is important to clarifying and exploring the related components. The study aimed to describe the components underlies to quality educational service in a cardiac rehabilitation program qualitatively and introduce some of the related problems. This is a qualitative study using qualitative content analysis method. Study population consisted of health practitioners working at health & research centers affiliated to Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, cardiac patients including inpatient and out patient service users and their assistants (family members). Data were gathered through conducting unstructured interviews with a purposive sample of 25(consisted of 3 physicians, 6 nurses, 1 dietarian, 13 patients and 2 patient assistant). The study was begun at 1386 and data analysis was completed at 1388. The rigor of the study was achieved applying Guba and Lincoln directions. The concept of quality educational services in cardiac rehabilitation is described using four underlying concepts namely fittingness, comprehensiveness, authenticity and orderliness that are the elements of quality educational services in the cardiac rehabilitation program. Based on the findings, paying attention to audiences’ special needs and capabilities are important determinants in providing quality educational services in the cardiac rehabilitation program. Hereby the audiences could receive the trustful and responsive services. We suggest organizing the education and information giving routs. It would result in service comprehensiveness that could save the service taking opportunities. The existed problems were inadequate fittingness, poor coordination in the services and poor referral system that were resulted in poor response to some of the audiences needs. "Quality educational services" is a context based concept. Considering the cardiac rehabilitation, it was emphasized on providing need based services fitted to user's capabilities, attending to various bio-psycho-social aspects at both person and family levels and serving the services through predefined and coordinated pathways. It is necessary to nurses as one of the key members of cardiac rehabilitation team that consider such emerged elements in service management and direct care delivery to the cardiac patients and their families. Future researches on emerged concepts are worthy to suggest.