The Effectiveness of The Teaching-learning Process
The typical activities of the teacher in the education process begin with assessing the needs of a particular individual. Thus, healthcare professionals must ensure that they understand the patient’s health state, lifestyle, and habits to provide the effectiveness of the teaching intervention. Additionally, one should assess the current level of knowledge the patient possesses to determine what information will be useful to them.
Ensuring people understand their healthcare is the most effective way to get them to act. Patients with a better understanding of their health are often more inclined to undertake self-management. They usually do not miss follow-up appointments, and are able to ask their doctors questions about the treatment. Thus, the learner’s expected outcome is understanding their health care needs, their condition, and ways of self-managing their disease or health state. Moreover, the patient must know in which cases they must address a healthcare professional.
Evidently, after the learning has taken place, there is a need to evaluate the knowledge of the patient to determine if the expected outcomes were achieved. One of the approaches to evaluating this is by asking the patient to repeat the information in their own words and summarize the materials they were provided. In this way, the clinician will be certain that the individual memorized and understood the recommendations they were provided.
Teaching Materials
Technology-based materials can help enhance the education process since they make it easier for patients to access the recommendations. In terms of this, clinicians can advise patients to use applications to track their behaviors or symptoms. For instance, if a patient with diabetes has to follow a DASH diet to control their blood sugar levels, the medical professional can recommend an application for tracking food intake, which contains information about the amount of natural and added sugar in food. This type of technology-based material can be evaluated based on its accessibility, whether they are free or have to be paid for, the reliability of the information they provide, based on whether there are references to reliable government resources or research, and the ease of use.
The pamphlet commonly used in my area of practice is a three-part brochure printed in color, with pictures or diagrams. The first part of the pamphlet typically contains the condition’s name as the title and common symptoms. Next, there are risk factors and behaviors that can subject the individual to the worsening of the symptoms. Finally, the third part of this pamphlet would have a set of self-management recommendations and cases when a clinician has to be contacted. The final part of such a brochure typically contains additional resources such as government websites where patients can access reliable information about their condition. The readability and grade level of such pamphlet is suitable for adults with sufficient health literacy since some terms may be difficult to understand without basic background knowledge.
Disease Process
The “Education and Support” page from CDC (2021) is a mediocre resource for patient education. Based on the criteria provided by Andersen and Klemm (2008), this article lacks information about the authors and the list of resources that were used to compose the information. However, this article contains accurate and comprehensive information about the condition from a readability viewpoint. Nevertheless, the visitors cannot contact the administrator directly to address inconsistencies in data. On the other hand, the connection is secure, and this resource has a message on data privacy. There are graphs and links to additional resources, and the website is easy to navigate.
References
Anderson, A. S. & Klemm, P. (2008). The Internet: Friend or foe when providing patient education? Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, 12(1), 55-63.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]. (2021). Education and support. Web.