Journal of Pharmaceutical Care & Health Systems
Open Access

Enhancing Health Outcomes: The Role and Challenges of Patient Education

Schlirf Leitn^{* *}Correspondence: Schlirf Leitn, Department of Clinical Pharmacy, Sciences Po University, Paris, France, Email:

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Description

An organized, interactive learning process called patient education is intended to help knowledgeable patients manage their lives while dealing with a condition and/or improve their overall health and well-being.

The process of giving patients information about their disease, including symptoms and warning signals, available treatment options, anticipated results and side effects, preventative measures, etc., is known as patient education.

Patient education should begin as soon as feasible after the patient's diagnosis. It aids patients in having a better understanding of their illness and potential therapeutic alternatives. Patient education, though it comes in various forms, strives to raise patient participation and engagement to enhance the mental and physical well-being of the patient.

Patient education is often necessary in two frequent situationsdischarge from hospital and chronic disease. Following specific surgeries, patients are given discharge patient education that includes instructions on how to take their prescriptions, handle special equipment, recognize common side effects, and receive care, among other things. The health educator offers lifestyle recommendations to patients suffering chronic illnesses that will assist them manage emergencies and medication side effects, maintain a high quality of life, and keep their sickness under control. Healthcare practitioners with training, such as primary care physicians, specialists, healthcare professionals, and professional health educators, are typically the ones that offer healthcare education. Health literacy and patient education are frequently used synonymously.

Despite certain similarities, the two concepts are fundamentally distinct since health literacy is frequently viewed as a preventative measure rather than a trait that comes with having an illness. “The amount in which someone is able to discover, comprehend and make use of data and resources to guide their health-related choices and behaviors for themselves and others" is how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define personal health literacy.

Any healthcare expert who has completed the necessary training may impart knowledge; patient interaction and education are typically covered in the training program for healthcare professionals. Nevertheless, more instruction is necessary to acquire the specialized abilities needed to support behavior modification and self-management. When it comes to patient comprehension, patient education frequently works better than resources like drug guidelines. To support patient education, a number of organizations are requesting that medical students take technical communication courses.

Managed care plans also include health education as one of its tools. This might include information on specific diseases or conditions as well as general preventative education or health promotion. Technical and Professional Communications (TPC), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) are two topics that are suggested in Patient Education courses to help health educators build straightforward and culturally appropriate communication channels. Gaining more knowledge about one's illness is intrinsically valuable, but just to a certain extent. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is questionable. If health education is to be meaningful, it must enhance patients' lives by achieving worthwhile goals.

These goals are far too frequently left unstated. Just 40% of published research on patient awareness programs for adult asthma patients included educational objectives, according to a recent analysis. Usually, these goals aimed to enhance knowledge about particular diseases or abilities related to self-management. The primary outcome measurements should be more fundamental goals, such as increased self-esteem or decreased anxiety or mortality connected to sickness, rather than these intermediary goals. These goals should ultimately be linked to what individual’s desire from their health care.

The ultimate objective of this model, which can be created once certain outcome indicators have been discovered, is to enhance the patient's standard of life. Insightful assessment of health care initiatives and their anticipated outcomes is also made possible by these models. The picture illustrates the way in which achieving one goal makes it easier to achieve another. Various models can be developed based on your beliefs about the nature of patient education as well as your own and your patients' values.

People may inquire about whether a program for patient education is effective for children with illnesses, their caregivers, or adult patients once the intended outcomes have been identified. New educational initiatives for patients should be investigated using controlled, randomized trials to see if they achieve the most important goals because they are interventions with unclear effects, either good or negative. The research should be planned to focus on outcomes people value most, rather than on any other goals, such as improving compliance to therapy or growing understanding about specific illnesses. These other goals are merely proxy targets and should be viewed with skepticism.

Conclusion

By defining the final goals, we can guarantee that research addresses pertinent issues and encourage innovative, thinking by imagining alternative ways to achieve our goals. Cost-utility evaluations of the results of randomized comparative trials would be the most effective method for responding to these queries. Congenital cardiac abnormalities are hard to understand and escape many of us who struggle to understand abstract ideas or complex three-dimensional structures. For many other complex medical disorders, the same holds true. While it is condescending to assume that patients are incapable of understanding, it can be problematic to gently demand that they acquire a specific degree of understanding. Despite the growing complexity and detail of patient-specific health information, we need to consider whether further education will advance an individual's health objectives while respecting acknowledging varying levels of cognitive ability and staying within educational boundaries.