Short CommunicationTeaching nurses how to teach: An evaluation of a workshop on patient education
Introduction
Patient education is widely recognized as a core component of nursing [1], [2]. However, nurses often lack formal training in patient education [3]. Assessing individual learning needs, individualizing teaching content and evaluating patient understanding have been identified as areas in which nurses would benefit from additional training [4], [5], [6], [7].
Furthermore, patient education has frequently been disease-centered rather than patient-centered. According to a patient-centered approach [8], exploring the patient's illness experience, for example, what the patient thinks about his disease or how he/she feels regarding his/her situation, is essential to providing quality care [9]. Exploring the patient's illness experience can make patient education more effective as patients’ interpretations of their disease may not correspond with the accepted medical understanding of it, and unexplored patients’ feelings may hinder the learning process [10]. A patient-centered approach has also been shown to improve patient satisfaction, treatment adherence and health outcomes, and all goals of patient education [11], [12], [13], [14], [15].
In March 2007 we developed a patient education workshop for nurses based on a patient-centered approach. In this study we report the impact of the workshop on nurses’ communication skills, self-reported knowledge, sense of preparedness to provide patient education.
Section snippets
Description of the workshop
The workshop was developed at a large academic hospital in the Northeast section of the United States and was open to a maximum of 20 nurses on a voluntary basis. The workshop was conducted by a nurse and a health educator and consisted of two 6-h sessions. (Table 1). A former patient was also present to offer the patient's perspective. Facilitators paid particular attention to the development of a nonjudgmental environment and the use of experiential learning methodologies such as
Description of participants
Fourteen participants attended on both days (Table 4). All but one participant were nurses. Of the nurses eight practiced in an inpatient setting and five practiced in an outpatient setting.
Dialogues
Fourteen pre-/post-dialogues were analyzed. As reported in Table 5, patients talked more and nurses were verbally less dominant in the post-dialogues (P = 0.018). Before and after the workshop, the majority of the nurse–patient exchanges were related to asking and giving information about medical and
Discussion
Our findings demonstrate that a 2-day workshop on patient education, based on a patient-centered approach, improved nurses’ communication skills and knowledge, and their sense of preparedness.
Studies evaluating communication trainings often focus on nurses’ self-reported competence in relating to patients [22], [23]. However, self-reported competence does not always indicate effective communication practice with patients [24]. In this study we coupled self-reported measures with a quantitative
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the participants of the workshop who gave us permission to use their work and to Joe Neis, who enriched our discussions by providing the patient's perspective. We would also like to thank Ann Hurley, RN, PhD, for her assistance in analyzing the data and Martha Griffin, RN, PhD, Diane Lancaster, RN, PhD, and Elena Vegni, MA, for their comments on the draft.
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