Design Thinking Paradigm on Patient Teaching

Patient teaching is a vital part of our nursing duties: to educate patients about medications, diet, exercise, complications, and recovery.  There are many areas around patient teaching that need improvement.  This article Educating Patients: Understanding Barriers, Learning Styles, and Teaching Techniques has helped identify a few of the common issues that arise during patient teaching.  I analyzed this article using the Design Thinking Paradigm

(Empathize- Define- Ideate- Prototype- Test) 

1. Empathize: Does the article reflect needs?

            The article begins by describing why educating patients has become such a challenge in hospital practice.  The article helps identify the growing concern amongst many health care providers: too much information, not enough time.   Patients are being discharged from the hospital sooner and less prepared to deal with the changes to their health.  The article also identifies the multitude of barriers that exist within patient teaching.  There is a sincere understanding of the issues that exist in our health care system. 

2. Define: Does author define problem clearly?

         The author L. Beagley describes the problem clearly: In order to effectively educate clients, health care providers must have an understanding of the principles of (adult) learning.  (Beagley, 2011).  The author proceeds to list and describe the various barriers to learning such as literacy, culture, language, and environmental barriers.  For example: low literacy could mean a client could read and write in certain contexts, but low health literacy means a client cannot understand specific terminology specific to health related topics.  

3.      Ideate- what is author’s recommendations to the problem?

         The author concludes that nurses learn about the different learning styles (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) before starting their teaching.  She also advises nurses to be aware of all barriers that can affect patient’s ability to learn.  She suggests being more aware of personal biases and prejudices that affect nurses’ attitudes and judgements.   However, she introduces the ideas but does not provide sufficient evidence to help support her conclusions or recommendations. 

Some of the recommendations/suggestions I have from reading this article

• Create/ perform Learning style checklist prior to teaching
•  Nurses are educated on various learning styles (visual/auditory/kinesthetic)
• Give examples of personal biases and prejudices and how to manage them
• Give examples of various questions (questionnaire or form) to help patients identify their motivation for rehabilitation
• Can there be a nurse that follows up after the teaching to follow up?
• Patient participation to help create their own learning goals
•  Examples of low health literacy and proper levels of written materials should be given

4.        Prototype: new program, protocol, procedure or policy

            One of the ideas that I have regarding this is to create a form or tool to help assess learning styles and what teaching strategies would best match that style.  For example if someone has difficulty hearing- a form would be given with simple pictures.  I believe that nurses are already doing this in some form or another but to put an actual step (procedure) to follow will help ensure consistency amongst all health care providers.

What are your thoughts?