Empowering Through Health Education
The Power of Patient Education: Empowering Patients for Better Health
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Do you feel frustrated with healthcare services?
0%Yes
0%No
0%Maybe sometimes
No matter what your answer is, the poll is there to help me gain an idea on how you currently feel about healthcare services.
Patient Education
PATIENT EDUCATION is important because the more you know, the more active you can be in your health care.
PATIENT EDUCATION includes information about your visits: "Why am I here?", "What is the plan?", "What should I be doing to meet my goals?", "What are my health goals?", "What does my doctor need from me?", "How can I better manage my health?", etc.
I believe patients should understand their body, their chronic diseases, treatment plans, imaging, testing, and procedures needed.
Why is Patient Education Important?
It comes down to communication.
Educating patients is communicating what is happening to them, how something occurred, what can be done about it, how a disease affects a person, why medications are being taken, what precautions to follow while taking certain medications, how the patient can gather their subjective information to provide during visits, etc.
If the patient is well informed, then they can play a more active role in their health. I want to help more people gain the confidence to take control of their health by learning about their body, their health needs, how to monitor their own symptoms and relate symptoms to causes, and how to communicate with their healthcare provider.
The Sky is the Limit
There is so much to teach and each person brings a new topic to cover.
Patient education is dependent on a person's literary and education level. If they are only spoken to using words they don't comprehend, then they will have a hard time following the conversation. So, they will have a hard time following the advice they received.
Everyone has different lifestyles and different ideas on health. Taking time to go through information and matching it up to each individual is important; however, with limited time allowed with each patient, patient education is also limited (Porter et al., 2022).
Summary
I believe patient education is important to empower people to take control of their health.
I want to fill in the gaps for clients on their education needs and help build understanding and better communication between the client and their providers.
I hope this journey with Nurse Shawna 2015 can help accomplish that for the individuals who feel frustrated with healthcare services.
Shawna White RN, BSN
Resources
Porter, J., Boyd, C., Skandari, M. R., & Laiteerapong, N. (2022). Revisiting the time needed to
provide adult primary care. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 38(1), 147–155.