HE CHAP1

• Health education is a standard care-giving role of the nurse.
• Patient teaching is an independent nursing function.
• Nursing practice includes education in the broad concepts of health and illness and comes naturally.
• The National League of Nursing Education (National League of Nursing) is responsible for identifying course content for curriculum on principles of teaching.
• The American Nurses Association (ANA) is responsible for establishing standards and qualifications for practice, including patient teaching.
• The International Council of Nurses (ICN) endorses health education as an essential component of nursing care delivery.
• The State Nurse Practice Act universally includes teaching within the scope of nursing practice.
• The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO) requires evidence of patient education to improve outcomes.
• The American Hospital Association (AHA) ensures that clients receive complete and current information.
• The Pew Health Professions Commissions puts forth a set of health profession competencies for the 21st century, with over one-half of the recommendations about the importance of patient and staff education.
• The Crossing the Duality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century focuses more broadly on how the health system can be reinvented to further innovations and improve the delivery of care.
• The Commission on Patient and Family Education provides education that supports patients and family, allowing sufficient interaction among the patient, family, and staff for learning.
• Social, economic, and political forces that affect a nurse’s role in healing include the growth of managed care, increased attention to the health and well-being of everyone in society, cost containment measures to control healthcare expenses, and concern for continuing education as a vehicle to prevent malpractice and incompetence.
• The purpose of patient, staff, and student education is to increase the competence and confidence of patients to manage their own self-care and of staff and students to deliver high-quality care.
• Teaching/Instruction is a deliberate intervention that involves sharing information and experiences to meet the intended learner outcomes.
• Major obstacles to learning include limited time due to rapid discharge from care, stress of acute and chronic illness, anxiety, sensory deficits, and low literacy, functional health illiteracy, lack of privacy/social isolation of healthcare environments, situational and personal variations on readiness to learn, motivation and compliance, and learning styles, extent of behavioral changes (in number and complexity) required, lack of support and positive reinforcement from providers and for significant others, complexity, inaccessibility, and fragmentation of the healthcare system.
• Most non-research based literature focuses on “how to do” patient teaching, more affection is given to the file needs of learners who have acute, short-term problems than to those who have chronic, long-term conditions, and more research is needed on new teaching technologies, especially computer-assisted modalities, distance education, and Internet-based health information sites.
• Nurses act in the role of educator for a diverse audience of learners, patients and their family members, nursing students, nursing staff, and other personnel.
• The goal of patient education is to help clients learn health-related behaviors to achieve the goal of optimal health and independence in self-care.
• Learning is a change in behavior (knowledge, skills, and attributes) that can be observed and measured, and can occur at any time or in any place as a result of exposure to environmental stimuli.
• The ASSURE Model is a useful paradigm to assist nurses to organize and carry the education process.
• Patient Education is the process of helping clients learn health-related behaviors to achieve the goal of optimal health and independence in self-care.
• Staff Education is the process of helping nurses acquire knowledge, attitudes, and skills to improve the delivery of quality care to the consumer.
• The partnership philosophy stresses the participatory nature of the teaching and learning process.
• Major barriers to teaching include lack of time to teach, inadequate preparation of nurses to assume the role of educator with confidence and competence, personal characteristics, low priority states given to teaching, environments not conducive to teaching-learning process, absence of 3rd party reimbursement, and doubt that patient education effectively changes outcomes.
• The education process is a systematic, sequential, planned course of action on the part of both the teacher and learner to achieve the outcomes of teaching and learning.
• The giver of information, assessor of needs, evaluator of learning, and reviser of appropriate methodology are roles of nurses as educators.
• Benefits of education to patients include increased consumer satisfaction, improved quality of life, ensured continuity of care, reduced incidence of illness complications, increased compliance with treatment, and decreased anxiety.
• Benefits of education to staff include enhanced job satisfaction, improved therapeutic relationship, increased autonomy in practice, improved knowledge and skills, and prepared clinical preceptors.
• Benefits of preceptor education for nursing students include prepared clinical preceptors, continuity of teaching/learning from classroom curriculum, evaluation and improvement of students' clinical skills, and prepared clinical preceptors.