Week 1 Assignments

Topic 1 DQ 1

Describe the nurse's role and responsibility as health educator. What strategies, besides the use of learning styles, can a nurse educator consider when developing tailored individual care plans, or for educational programs in health promotion? When should behavioral objectives be utilized in a care plan or health promotion?

Roles and responsibilities

Nurses play an important role in the process of quality education to patients. As an educator, a nurse has a role in ensuring that the information provided to the patient about care is patient-centered on ensuring effective understanding. Nurses are responsible for the administration of medications to patients once the patient has been seen by the doctor. When prescribing medication, the nurse is expected to share information about the medication to ensure that the patient takes the medication as recommended. As nurses attend to their patients, they must ensure that the patients comprehend the conditions that they suffer from and how the medication will help them recover. The nurse can also address the critical preventative guidelines when the patient is being discharged from the hospital (Omer, Suliman, & Moola, 2016). 

Strategies

One of the strategies to consider when developing a tailored individual care plan is the cultural and religious beliefs of the patient. The nurse must be culturally sensitive when providing education to patients from different backgrounds to make the patient more comfortable, thereby increasing the possibility of the patient to follow the instructions. The other strategy is to take the message to the location of potential patients because there are people who do not seek healthcare regularly. As patient educators, the nurses should organize missions in these locations of the populations so that the teaching can be tailored to the local geographical boundaries.

When to utilize behavioral objectives

Behavioral objectives are specified in communities with deeply enshrined traditional and cultural beliefs and may be used in cases where certain myths of the population may affect health-seeking behaviors. In this sense, behavioral modifications go along with education to experience the best success rate of patient care.

Topic 1 DQ 2

Describe a health promotion model used to initiate behavioral changes. How does this model help in teaching behavioral changes?  What are some of the barriers that affect a patient's ability to learn? How does a patient's readiness to learn, or readiness to change, affect learning outcomes?

A health promotion model utilized to initiate behavioral modifications is the Pender's Health Promotion Model. This model focuses on ensuring that the behavior change leads to enhanced health, improved functional ability, and enhanced quality of life at all stages of development. The Pender's Health Promotion Model helps in teaching behavioral changes by focusing on three main areas which make it effective. The three main areas include individual characteristics and experiences, behavior, specific cognition and affects, and behavioral outcomes (Khoshnood, Rayyani, & Tirgari, 2018). 

    Several barriers affect a patient's ability to learn. One of the barriers is insufficient time, in which case, patient education is often scheduled within few minutes, thus making the education program to be so brief leaving out some important information hanging and patients are note given a chance to ask questions. The other barrier is insufficient knowledge and expertise of the nurse, whereby nurses who lack adequate knowledge to educate patients often provide patients with insufficient information during patient education. Another barrier is the lack of patient readiness, both physiologically and psychologically. Further, the age of the patient also acts as a barrier because older patients often have limited memory and diminished cognitive ability which affects their ability to learn and remember what they are taught (Douthit et al., 2015).

A patient's readiness to learn or readiness to change determines the patient’s willingness to seek for knowledge and participate in behavior change. For instance, in a case where a patient is interested in seeking knowledge, he or she often adapts to the changes easily and therefore changes his or her behavior rapidly.

References

American Diabetes Association. (2016). 1. Strategies for improving care. Diabetes care, 39(Supplement 1), S6-S12.

Douthit, N., Kiv, S., Dwolatzky, T., & Biswas, S. (2015). Exposing some important barriers to health care access in the rural USA. Public health, 129(6), 611-620.

Khoshnood, Z., Rayyani, M., & Tirgari, B. (2018). Theory analysis for Pender’s health promotion model (HPM) by Barnum’s criteria: a critical perspective. International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, 1(ahead-of-print).

Omer, T. A., Suliman, W. A., & Moola, S. (2016). Roles and responsibilities of nurse preceptors: Perception of preceptors and preceptees. Nurse education in practice, 16(1), 54-59.