Nursing Education Quiz

Module 9: Patient Education

• Patient education is a crucial role for nurses.
• Patients and family members need education to make informed decisions.
• Patient education is important due to shorter hospital stays, increased demands on nurses, and an increase in patients with acute or chronic conditions.
• Nurses are primary sources of information and clarify information from other healthcare providers.

Learning Outcomes

• Describe effective teaching methods and evaluation strategies.
• Explain how to integrate health education into patient-centered care.
• Describe the domains of learning.
• Identify basic learning principles.
• Describe a teaching plan's role in client education.
• Identify factors that facilitate and inhibit learning.
• Describe strategies to assess client learning needs.
• Describe effective teaching methods and evaluation strategies.
• Explain how to integrate health education into patient-centered care.

Health Literacy

• Health literacy: defined by the Canadian Public Health Association as the ability to access, understand, evaluate, and communicate information to improve health in various settings throughout life.
• In practice, health literacy includes understanding symptoms, finding help for health issues, understanding medical information, and safely using medications.
• Literacy and intelligence are distinct concepts.

Definitions

• Literacy: understanding and using printed information.
• Numeracy: understanding and using math in school, work, and life.
• Health literacy: accessing, understanding, and using health information to manage one's health.
• Digital literacy: skills needed to search, select, judge, transform, communicate, and utilize online health information.

Did You Know?

• 23% of Canadians find it difficult to locate professional help when ill.
• 60% of Canadians have difficulty understanding and acting upon health information to make appropriate decisions.
• 54% of Canadians struggle to decide when to seek a second opinion from a doctor.
• Low health literacy is linked to more hospitalizations, repeated doctor visits, and difficulty understanding medication instructions, including potential side effects.
• 84% of Canadian jobs require basic technical skills, which are becoming increasingly important for low-skilled jobs, requiring some level of digital literacy.
• Many working-age Canadians struggle with technology-rich problem-solving environments.
• 9% of Canadians lack internet access at home.

Literacy as a Determinant of Health

• Literacy is a critical ability to communicate, think critically, and make informed decisions—it helps us understand the world around us.
• Increasing health literacy empowers people to manage their health, advocate for themselves and their families, and reduces the burden on the healthcare system.

Digital Health Literacy

• Digital health literacy: needed skills to search, select, judge, transform, communicate, and use online health information.
• Well-designed digital health literacy programs help mediate the effects of social determinants on health disparities.

Importance of Digital Health Literacy

• Canadians living in remote communities often score significantly lower on digital health literacy than those in urban areas.
• Canadians with lower levels of education tend to score lower on digital health literacy.
• Older adults (65+) often score significantly lower than other age groups on digital health literacy assessments.
• Canadians with lower incomes often score lower on digital health literacy assessments.
• Canadians with access to personal health information online and those with family doctors often report higher digital health literacy scores.

Literacy and Patient Health

• Low health literacy has a major negative impact on health.
• Incorrect medication use, failure to follow medical instructions, and errors in administering infant formulas are linked to low health literacy.
• Low health literacy increases risks in the community, at work, and at home.
• Inability to access information for personal lifestyle and coping skills are also related to low health literacy.

The Importance of Health Literacy

• Health literacy includes skills needed to make healthy lifestyle choices.
• Health and safety information needs to be accessible and understandable.
• Access to proper health services is also very important.

Health Literacy Assessment Tool for Patient Care

• The Newest Vital Sign (NVS) is a valid and reliable screening tool for low health literacy, available in English and Spanish.
• The NVS is quick and easy to use and helps providers adjust their communication appropriately to meet each patient's needs.
• The NVS uses a nutrition label from an ice cream container along with 6 questions to evaluate health literacy.

Patient Education (continued)

• Educating patients is one of the most essential parts of a nurse's role.
• Patients and their family members need health education to decide what is best for the patient, informed decisions are especially important with the current trend towards shorter hospital stays and increase in patients with acute or chronic conditions.
• Nurses are critical sources of information and clarify information from other healthcare providers for their patients.

Basic Learning Principles

• Learning environment, ability to learn (emotional, intellectual, physical capabilities, developmental stage).
• Learning in children and adult learning considerations, social determinants of health.
• Principles such as association, imitation, motivation, pacing, recency, primacy, and arousal affect learning outcomes.
• Accurate and prompt feedback from educators are key to learning.

Basic Learning Principles (continued)

• Learning environment supports effective instruction.
• Motivation to learn depends on the patient's desire.
• Ability to learn influences success and is based on various factors like physical condition.

Teaching and Learning

• Teaching is an interactive process that promotes learning.
• Effective teaching occurs when learners recognize knowledge or skill deficits and begin to address them through new skills or knowledge.
• Effective teaching caters to a learner's specific needs, learning style, and capacity.

Role of the Nurse in Teaching and Learning

• Nurses create learning environments that are beneficial to their patients.
• Patient-centered approaches are effective in tailoring education to each patient.
• Assessing the learner's needs for learning is a key aspect of effective patient education.
• Using appropriate educational strategies is important in patient care.
• Relevant information, delivered clearly and accurately, is critical for patient education.

Teaching as Communication

• Effective teaching is similar to effective communication.
• Empathetic listening, precise observation, and clear speaking/presenting are all critical communication tools for teaching.

Bloom's Domains of Learning (1956)

• Bloom's taxonomy describes the three main domains of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
• Cognitive domain: involves all intellectual behaviors and requires thinking.
• Affective domain: involves feelings, attitudes, opinions, and values.
• Psychomotor domain: involves acquiring skills requiring integration of mental and muscular activity.

Domains of Learning (continued)

• Cognitive domain (understanding) includes remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
• Affective domain (attitudes) includes receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterizing.
• Psychomotor domain (motor skills) includes imitation, naturalization, articulation, precision, manipulation, and others.

Develop Objectives

• Clarify and specify learning intentions.
• Clarify what learners should know, think, feel, or be able to do.
• Create accountability for learning.

Domains of Learning (Cognitive Domain)

• Includes remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

Domains of Learning (Affective Domain)

• Receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterizing.

Domains of Learning (Psychomotor Domain)

• Perception, set, guided response, mechanism, complex overt response, adaptation, and origination.

Integrating the Nursing and Teaching Processes

• Nursing and teaching processes are interconnected and usually occur concurrently.
• Similar to the nursing process, the teaching process requires assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation.
• The nursing process is broader than the teaching process.
• Assessment of learning needs, ability to learn, motivation to learn, teaching environment, and resources required for learning.

Literacy Assessment

• Clues that a patient is struggling to understand: withdrawal and avoidance, making excuses, frustration when reading, puzzled looks, irrelevant statements.

People with Poor Reading Skills

• Difficulty or challenges in reading and comprehending information that may manifest as poor analytical skills, difficulty with assimilation, inability to formulate questions, or fear of negative reactions.

Examples of Nursing Diagnoses

• Health maintenance, health-seeking behaviours, health self-management, mastery of health-related skills, deficient knowledge.

Goals of Patient Education

• Maintaining and promoting health, preventing illness.
• Restoring health.
• Coping with impaired functioning.

Planning

• Identifying patient learning needs, defining a nursing focus, developing a teaching plan, establishing goals and expected outcomes, collaborating with patients to select appropriate teaching methods.

Planning Considerations for Learning

• Developing learning objectives, setting priorities, timing, organizing teaching materials, maintaining attention and promoting participation, building on existing knowledge, selecting appropriate methods and resources, outlining a teaching plan.

Implementation

• Incorporating teaching into nursing care, implementing teaching methods (one-on-one discussion, group instruction, preparatory instruction, demonstrations, analogies, role-playing, simulations), addressing learning barriers (illiteracy, learning disabilities, health literacy, sensory alterations, language barriers, cultural diversity needs of patients with severe illness).

Evaluation

• Evaluating whether or not the patient understood the teaching material, reinforcing correct behaviors, changing behaviors that require correcting, and documenting success based on patient performance of expected outcomes.
• Measurement methods, patient expectations, and documentation are part of evaluating teaching and learning effectiveness.

Test your knowledge on key aspects of nursing education and patient communication. This quiz covers important diagnoses, patient reading skills, and effective teaching strategies in nursing. Enhance your understanding of the educational component of nursing practice.