Being a health educator, a nurse is responsible for teaching patients how to cope with their issues. Patients need to be educated from admission because it is vital for their further health outcomes. Primarily, the health educator is accountable for patient assessment (Bastable, 2021). This includes figuring out one’s disorder, physical and mental peculiarities, learning style, and other characteristics. Additionally, it incorporates the evaluation of learning impediments as they may drastically slow the knowledge acquisition process (Bastable, 2021). Such barriers may be cultural, social, psychological, language, and environment related. Nonetheless, patients must be educated to manage, sustain, and improve their well-being. Hence, nurses apply specific strategies which affect health outcomes on a state level.
One of the major methods is to work with the interdisciplinary team because the collaboration allows for elaborating a multifaceted tailored teaching plan for a patient. It is indispensable to ensure one’s motivation and goals to obtain a health-related education to make a more effective action plan. In addition, nurses must utilize their techniques themselves to show that those work. Moreover, nurse educators need to focus on a certain target population with the same values and motivation (Bastable, 2021). They should explore if any barriers impede the learning process. Ultimately, the specialists must provide various learning resources (video, text, and audio) in different forms (written and oral) to diversify the procedure of knowledge acquisition.
The nurse educator must utilize behavioral objectives once the patient desires to change their habits or lifestyle. However, this process requires a thorough analysis of one’s physical and mental health, learning barriers, motivation, and other related factors. Once these aspects are analyzed, the professionals may develop patient-centered care and teaching plans. As a result, nurse educators play an important role in promoting health awareness and teaching self-care.
Reference
Bastable, Susan B. (2021). Nurse as educator: Principles of teaching and learning for nursing practice. Jones & Bartlett Learning.