A Guide For Nurses: Teaching Healthcare Effectively to Patients by Lara Alspaugh Considering a career in nursing?

Browse your options As a nurse one of our principal responsibilities is to educate our patients. Our teaching reaches across a broad gamut: medications (old and new), procedures, wound care, signs and symptoms to be aware of, health habits, how to continue caring for themselves once their home and more. The teaching can occur as spontaneous answers to questions from our patients or more formal educating including a plan and resource materials. Patients are held in-house for increasingly shorter stays and are going home sicker, precipitating a greater need for instruction and information than ever before. The information you provide them during their hospital stay will hopefully help them gain a full recovery and decrease the risk of readmission. So how do we educate our patients effectively? Taking these factors into consideration will help you to successfully convey the information needed. Provide a hospitable learning environment: With all the distractions of the hospital it may be difficult to find somewhere that is free from excess noise, disruption, is private and conducive to learning. While we cant always choose the physical location where the learning will take place, we can try to provide planned learning at a time of day when those disruptions would be minimal; possibly mid-morning after breakfast, morning hygiene, assessments and rounds. Each floor has a different rhythm, choose what will work best for you and your patient. Help your patients decide who should be involved in the learning process. When considering a pediatric patient, ideally both parents would be present for the information as well as any potential caregivers to the child. However, a teenage mother who has just given birth may not be as receptive to you and what she needs to know to care of herself in the post-partum period, if her own father is present. Embarrassment and modesty may interfere. Without making judgments help your clients decide who needs to know what. Establish a baseline of knowledge. What do they already know? Is your patient a young woman newly diagnosed with breast cancer? Her needs will be vastly different than a sixty year older woman who was the care taker of her own mother with breast cancer and now finds herself diagnosed with the disease as well. Make no assumptions in what someone does or does not know. Ask. Ask your client what they think they need to know. While the saying we dont know what we dont know (or unconscious incompetence) may apply, asking your patient what they feel they need to know to go home safely may provide you with a different prospective for your teaching

plan. This is one way to involve people in the learning process, by allowing them to guide their learning they will be more invested and will increase their willingness to participate, motivation and ability to retain information. What do they need to know to go home safely? Not only are patients staying in the hospital for shorter stays, our time with patients is limited as well. Staffing, complexity and resource issues all play a part in how much time there will be to educate. Establish your priorities. Decide what is vital for your patient to know upon discharge and get to that information first. Are there any cultural, religious or beliefs and practicesyou should be aware of that may impact their learning or the information you are planning to pass on? Considering a family of Mexican heritage, it would be important to bear in mind that traditionally the man is considered the head of the household and any information pertaining to important decisions would need to be conveyed to him directly. Asking your client if there are any beliefs they hold that would interfere with what they are learning would be appropriate. Assess a patients motivation prior to embarking on a teaching plan. With the best plan in place, no learning will happen if your client is wholly unmotivated. Remembering that illness, fatigue, depression and anxiety are all factors in motivation toward learning; they can also be readily present in a health care setting. Working with the patient and the patients family and team of health care givers to help promote the motivation to learn is essential.

How to Facilitate the Learning Process of Nursing Students By Lilly Taylor, eHow Contributor

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1 Assist students and instructors in recognizing the three basic learning styles, auditory, visual and kinesthetic. Brainstorm with instructors to determine what existing programs meet these needs and which learning styles are currently not being thoroughly addressed. Make special efforts to offer multisensory learning experiences for nursing students, due to the necessity in their career to perform in all three arenas. 2 Poll students to identify what they believe their program's strengths and weaknesses are. Make sure to facilitate both study groups of small numbers of students and review sessions, generally conducted by an instructor or advanced student, that may include the entire student population. Determine whether your facility has the personnel to be able to offer one-on-one tutoring to students who need individual remediation. Develop intervention for students who have special needs, such as learning disabilities, severe test anxiety or other limitations that could have a negative effect on learning the material.

, who need to hear the information. Tape lectures or specific explanations of difficult material for these students to review on audio-visual media. Make available guest speakers who can approach the target material from a distinctive perspectives. Have study sessions at which an advanced student is present to verbally answer students' questions and conduct spoken recitation of memory work.

Help visual learners to succeed by giving them the opportunity to see that which they are required to learn. Demonstrate the information whenever possible. Record these demonstrations and make the recordings available to students to review as needed. Have pairs or trios of advanced students demonstrate the same material and encourage discussion regarding similarities and variations. Focus on developing visual representations of the information in the form of posters or other diagrams.

Give kinesthetic learners the opportunity to learn by doing. Use working models to provide these students with hands-on learning. Encourage instructors to offer practicum sessions where students can go through the exact motions of a procedure with an expert standing by to offer suggestions and corrections. Have these students make models or draw things if it is not possible to actually perform the action in real time (cadaver studies for example).

Require nursing students to participate in small-group discussions regarding their internships and clinical experiences. Have group moderators aid students in identifying what knowledge could have enhanced their practical experience and how to obtain that information. Provide students with frequent self-evaluation questionnaires to enable them to evaluate their own performance and identify areas in which they feel they need additional training to be successful.

Continue to review new educational media as they are developed; interactive, computer-based materials are becoming more popular all the time, especially in the science and health care industries. Keep records of student grades and the dates of the implementation of new learning experiences. Periodically review which types of new programs have the greatest effect on student learning. Tips & Warnings

Review school accreditation information, in many circumstances schools are strongly encouraged to provide learning-style-based programming, and it will reflect well upon the school at reassessment time. Make participation in extracurricular learning experiences pleasant, provide the occasional snack or have a favorite instructor occasionally drop by to participate. Encourage the attitude that every student can benefit from these experiences, not merely those who are struggling. Don't let a spirit of competitiveness creep into your learning programs. Each student has individual strengths and weaknesses, and although it is tempting to view merit based on

grades, it is important to remember that there are many intangible qualities also required for success in nursing.