Evaluation of effectiveness of education in the management of epinephrine autoinjectors

Introduction: anaphylaxis is a medical emergency and the early administration of epinephrine is essential to reduce morbimortality. Patients with diagnosis of anaphylaxis have epinephrine autoinjectors so they can administer the medication without delay. The main goal of our study is to evaluate the parents’ knowledge about anaphylaxis and the use of epinephrine auto injectors and to see if their knowledge improves after some training.

Material and methods: before and after comparison study. We analyzed 6 primary attention groups and selected patients diagnosed with anaphylaxis that had epinephrine autoinjector prescription. They received 2 emails. The first one had a survey about anaphylaxis disease and how to use the autoinjector of epinephrine. The second one contained videos and a second survey. That way we compared parents´ knowledge before and after receiving some training.

Results: food was the main cause of anaphylaxis. Only 56.3% of the participants always carried the autoinjector. Comparing the knowledge before and after the intervention we observed an improvement in the knowledge in nearly all the steps of the administration of epinephrine. The improvement was statistically significant in the identification of the safety cap (p 0.018) and knowing the possibility of repeating a second dose (p 0.006). There was a clear improvement on the knowledge of the need of massaging the injection area but it was not statistically significant (p 0.066)

Conclusions: periodic training about how to use the autoinjectors is key to reduce de morbimortality of patients with anaphylaxis.