Best Practice in Educational Design for Patient Learning

Abstract

Education is a key component of patient care, with significant potential to positively impact health outcomes through patient empowerment and behavior change. Patient empowerment through education has the potential to improve knowledge, understanding, adherence, skills, and overall HRQoL through healthier behaviors. Indeed, systematic reviews for patient education as an intervention in chronic illnesses have found reduced hospitalizations and clinic visits, improved quality adjusted life years, or productivity. In an era of increasing demands while time and other resources decrease, best evidence-based practices in educational design for patient care are necessary. Proving specific patient education models are of value is important; however, this has been challenging due to the heterogeneity of interventions and populations studied. While this may appear as a concern, this should be viewed as a significant opportunity rather than a limitation, as educational design has been more rigorously evaluated in other sectors. There is an opportunity for healthcare professionals to apply some lessons from the medical education literature to their patient education. The expanding diversity of educational design options creates an exciting mandate to transform patient education. This chapter presents a discussion of educational design that comes from medical education literature, which can be generalizable to patients as long as potential literacy, culture, and physiological obstacles are kept in mind. The chapter explores how to “make a diagnosis of patient learning needs,” and formulate a “therapeutic intervention” of education that is contextualized to the patient and their individual circumstances, being culturally responsive and non-biased – an intervention that is engaging and relevant to them achieving their learning and healthcare outcomes. Finally, the concept of “formal assessment” to see if the educational therapy worked or not, and how to improve, should be part of patient “follow-up.” Practical strategies to achieve these features of patient education are presented.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains.

The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

― William Arthur Ward