Reasons Of Why Patient Education Handouts Are Important

By Christopher Moore


A patient education is a process where in the patients and as well as their caregivers are provided with information about changing their health lifestyles and improving status of health. This is usually conducted by some health professionals. These healthcare professionals that have undertaken the appropriate education and training for patient communication.

This education type is required with the building elements for skills and responsibilities. There is a need for the patient to know the reasons how, why, and when they need to alter their kind of lifestyle. The team members or group members of health care of a certain patient should also be involved. The importance of having patient education handouts is to know its values.

One important part for them to respond to medical care is to provide them with the handouts to inform them about the health problems, the description of medical treatments, and also to promote healthy behaviors. But developing the handout may be difficult. This is because many caregivers may do not have the time and training for writing and designing it.

Even the writers who have skills and even the journalists have said that they are no really prepared of doing some writings of instructions that all kinds of patients will understand. Writing contents that are grammatically correct already is not enough. For this reason, writers must be creative, sensitive, and flexible when it comes to the usage of graphic designs, illustrations, and language so that patients will understand the handouts.

Typically, contents written in a handout is consists of descriptions and information of diseases and advices for it from the caregivers. These are considered as extensions of spoken communications. For the reason of increasing the understanding for how readers will be giving importance to these contents, how the content is created and is maintained, and how behaviors have influenced the people, there would really be a possibility that the handouts will become very effective.

There are three reasons why these handouts are really important. First, it is an extension of medical care and also, it affects the quality of care. The very purpose of this handout is to improve the patients health and quality of life. A handout should also be improving some behaviors by changing the knowledge, values, skills, and choices of the people which are related to their health.

Second is the spoken messages may possibly be forgotten quickly, thus, an informative handout is useful. It is possible that spoken messages are quickly lost and can be reinterpreted. So a handout can prevent reinterpretation and loss and would help in reducing to remember instructions and to guess some forgotten meanings.

Third, opinions towards the caregivers may be provided by patients because of the handouts. It serves as a means of communication through meta messages and messages. Messages are those instructions provided for the patients and meta messages are the important reasons for messages and for patients toward caregivers. Both may be important parts in the involvement of an institution for marketing.

To summarize the values of patient education, it improves the understanding of medical conditions, disease, diagnosis, or disability, and the methods and means of managing the different aspects of medical conditions. It also improves the self advocacy about the decision of whether to be dependent or independent with the medical providers. And lastly, it can decrease the number of visits and phone calls and it will lower the risk of having a malpractice on some expectations.




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