Health Promotion In Health and Role of Nursing Educator

Role of Nursing Educator and Health Promotion In Health

The Role of Nurse as Educator in Health Promotion,Nursing Educator as Facilitator of Change,Nursing Educator as Contractor,Nursing Educator as Organizer,Nursing Educator as Evaluator.

The Role of Nurse as Educator in Health Promotion

    Nurses as educators are in a key position to promote healthy lifestyles. Combining content specific to the discipline of nursing, knowledge from educational theories, and health behavior models allows for an integrated approach to shaping the health behaviors of individuals through education. The roles of the nurse as educator include facilitator of change, contractor, organizer, and evaluator.

Nursing Educator as Facilitator of Change

    The goal of the nurse as educator is, of course, to promote health. Health education and health promotion are integral to this effort. At the same time, the nurse as educator is an important facilitator of change. When teaching is viewed as an intervention, it needs to be considered in the context of other nursing interventions that will effect change. 

    As far back as 1987, de Tornay and Thompson proposed that explaining. analyzing, dividing complex skills, demonstrating, practicing, asking questions, and providing closure are effective in facilitating change in the learning situation.

Nursing Educator as Contractor

    Contracting has been a popular means of facilitating learning. Informal or formal contracts can delineate and promote learning objectives. Similar in steps to the nursing process, educational contracting involves stating mutual goals to be accomplished, devising an agreed upon plan of action, evaluating the plan, and deriving alternatives. 

    The plan of action needs to be as specific as possible and include the who, what, when, where, and how of the learning process. Responsibilities that are clearly stated aid in evaluating the plan and directing plan revisions in light of the changing healthcare system, a greater emphasis on patient nurse partnerships is needed because patients are expected to take increasingly more responsibility for and control of the decisions that affect their own health. 

    Educational contracting is the key to informed decision making.When education is viewed in the context of the client, rather than the client in the context of education, learning is individualized. The fit between the client as learner and the nurse as educator has the capacity to facilitate learning. Indeed, the goodness of fit between these two educational participants can be a motivating factor. 

    Do the client and the educator share an understanding of backgrounds or language? Is there a mutual understanding of goal setting? Are health beliefs respected?A contract involves a trusting relationship. In a mutually satisfying teacher learner relationship system, trust is a key ingredient. 

    The learner trusts that the nurse as educator possesses a respectable, current body of theoretically based and clinically applicable knowledge. The nurse needs to be approachable, trustworthy. and culturally sensitive because the learner’s own health status is often valued as a private matter. 

    In turn, the nurse trusts that when the client enters into an agreement, the learner will demonstrate behaviors that are health promoting. Newman and Brown (1986) list the following elements as part of an ideal relationship that are still highly relevant today: both parties have trust and respect, the teacher assumes the learner can learn and is sensitive to individual needs, and both parties feel free to learn and make mistakes. 

Nursing Educator as Organizer

    Organization of the learning situation, including manipulation of materials and space, sequential organization of content from simple to complex, and determination of the priority of subject matter, are tasks taken on by the nurse when in the role of educator. Organization of learning material decreases obstacles to learning. 

    Attendance at educational programs or individual sessions can be organized around the target learner as well as significant others to facilitate the learning process and promote motivation to learn.

Nursing Educator as Evaluator

    Educational programs, like other healthcare projects, need to be accountable to the learner or consumer of the health service. This account ability is ensured by evaluation in the form of outcomes. Self-evaluation, learner evaluation. organization evaluation, and peer evaluation are not new concepts. Indeed, evaluative processes are an integral part of all learning. Application of knowledge that improves the health of individuals, families, and groups is the evaluative measure of learning. 

    The evidence is less than adequate for implementing nursing interventions that specifically address the variables of compliance and motivation as related to health behaviors of the learner. With the explosion of interest in evidence-based practice, additional conceptually based research that identifies, describes, explains, and predicts health behaviors of the learner needs to be conducted.

    Healthy People 2020 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010) has established four major goals:

    Attain high quality, longer lives free of preventable disease, disability, injury, and premature death.Achieve health equity, eliminate disparities, and improve the health of all groups Create social and physical environments that promote good health for all Promote quality of life, healthy development, and healthy behaviors across all life stages

    This document sets the stage for the nurse as educator to use theoretically based strategies to promote desirable health behaviors of the learner. Carter and Kulbok (2002), in an integrative review of motivational research, conclude that no clear definition of motivation exists. that certain populations have been under represented in motivational research, and that motivation may not be able to be effectively measured. 

    They challenge researchers and practitioners to carefully examine the role of motivation in influencing health behaviors. Zinn (2005) argues that there are insufficient data to explain why people take health risks and that more research concerning how an individual’s knowledge is shaped and how it affects health f behaviors is needed. A clarion call has been sounded for both qualitative and quantitative conceptually grounded research to be infused into the teaching-learning process. 

    Forums for evidence based learning ought to be widely established and should include discussion relative to compliance, motivation, and health behaviors of the learner (Gleasman-DeSimone. 2012). Considering the persistence of the nursing workforce shortage and the critical nursing faculty shortage, motivational factors should be a paramount focus of research in nursing education as well as patient education. 

    Critical components of this chapter included a discussion of the concepts of compliance, adherence, and motivation, assessment of the level of learner motivation; identification of incentives and obstacles that affect motivation; and discussion of axioms of motivation relevant to learning. Selected health behavior frameworks and their influence on learning were compared to one another. 

    In support of the role of nurse as educator, strategies that facilitate health behaviors of the learner were outlined and selected theories and models that influence compliance and motivation were addressed. The information and evidence presented in this chapter clearly indicate that when people are motivated and know that they can make a difference in their own lives, the foundation is set for change in their health behaviors.