Self-Management Techniques: How To Educate The Educators

How to help healthcare professionals educate their patients.

What’s the best way to educate educators? Your organization provides a considerable amount of CME to your learners. You help design quality content that keeps healthcare professionals engaged and helps them obtain the information, insight, and credits they need to provide quality medical care. However, when it comes to helping healthcare professionals teach their patients self-management techniques, the education process can become more complicated. You’re not just teaching healthcare professionals, you’re teaching them how to teach their patients. So how should you go about this process?

Focus On Delivery, Not Just Content

It’s important to note that, when designing a self-management CME course, you should not become preoccupied with the specific self-management techniques that your learners need to communicate. Your primary goal is to show medical professionals how to teach their patients about self-care. While the specific techniques are important, helping professionals effectively communicate with their patients is the primary goal.

In other words, don’t get bogged down with what healthcare professionals should teach their patients to the extent that it eclipses how they should teach.

In order to help you navigate this instructional process, we’ve provided some ideas that will help you design a course that shows your learners how to effectively teach their patients self-management skills.

Ideas For An Effective Self-Management Techniques Course

Here are some tools that you can utilize while designing a course that helps medical professionals teach their patients about self-care:

• Video tutorials: Video tutorials are an excellent way to demonstrate effective methods for communicating medical care routines to patients. By incorporating video learning into your course, you can provide a robust example of self-management instruction for healthcare professionals to follow as they teach their patients. A video format helps your learners visualize themselves in their instructional role and, as a result, more easily adopt the methods that your course advocates. Visuals have been found to improve learning and comprehension by 400%, so utilizing the video format will help your learners better absorb the content of your course.
• Case studies: Thought-provoking case studies help individuals take a more active role in their learning. You can present different scenarios of patient-doctor interactions in order to stimulate critical reflection on the most effective methods for teaching patients to address their own health needs. By offering your learners case studies to think through, you encourage them to brainstorm different communication styles they will want to utilize while teaching their patients about personal self-management skills.
• Templates: It’s hard to retain information, especially during a medical visit. For patients with little to no medical training, absorbing information about medical care can feel like drinking from a fire hose. In order to help healthcare professionals provide their patients with the informational resources they need, provide a template that they can fill out and give to their patients as a reference. By helping your learners create and circulate follow-up educational materials, you will go a long way toward increasing their instructional aptitude.

EthosCE is the industry-leading, SCORM-compliant learning management system designed to automate and modernize the delivery of continuing education in the health professions. We work closely with leading medical associations, academic centers, and health systems to optimize their technology infrastructure and create an easy-to-use and intuitive environment for learners and CME administrators alike. For more information about EthosCE, please contact us at 267-234-7401.