Patient education is a planned interactive learning process designed to support and enable expert patients to manage their life with a disease and/or optimise their health and well-being.

Overview

Education may be provided by any healthcare professional who has undertaken appropriate training education, education on patient communication and education is usually included in the healthcare professional's training. However, further training is required to develop specialist skills needed to facilitate self-management and behaviour change. Patient Education can often be more effective in Patient comprehension that things such as medication guides. Many institutions are calling for courses in educating medical students in Technical Communication to promote Patient Education and the subsequent benefits thereof. Health education is also a tool used by managed care plans, and may include both general preventive education or health promotion and disease or condition specific education. Some topics proposed in Patient Education courses include Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) in order to prepare Health educators to create simple and culturally sensitive avenues of communication.

Benefits

Important elements of patient education are skill building and responsibility: patients need to know when, how, and why they need to make a lifestyle change. Group effort is equally important: each member of the patient's health care team needs to be involved. It can also help the patients by a better lifestyle, it gives them the ability to learn new information. The value of patient education can be summarized as follows:

Health Educators

The competencies of a health educator include the following:

Outcomes

There are many areas where patient education can improve the outcomes of treatment.

Footnotes