Tuesday, June 11, 2013

The Importance Of Patient Education Handouts

By Mara Boone


Patient education handouts are written documents. These documents are majorly made for the sick people. They are made available in some hospitals depending on how necessary the administration of those particular hospitals finds them.

The target group of these documents is basically the whole world population, depending on their content. However, most of them are provided to the disadvantaged sick people. These are patients who are deaf, but can see. Others are mostly designed for patients with amnesia. Considering their rate of forgetting even the simplest of things, they are presented to them or to their relatives to serve as reminders.

These publications have their pros and cons. However, they are more advantageous than disadvantageous. Their advantages include the lasting impact they have on the memory of a patient. Also, they are likely to get to more people as compared to gatherings or electronic media which may not be accessed by many. They can also be kept for future reference. Since they are read over and over again, clarifications on some aspects may be sought in the future in case of any forgetting. Written information may also be more appealing to the reader than other forms.

These documents have very many advantages. The most important is, they improve the adherence levels of a patient to medication, since chances of forgetting when they should be taking the medication are really minimized. This is because reference can always be made to the written instructions of the doctors. They also help reach a larger group of people beyond the targeted individual. These may include family members or those living with the patients that are given these handouts.

However, they also have a few shortcomings. Some of them include littering the environment hence a dirty and polluted environment. Other people may also not be willing to spend their time to read them, leading to wastage of resources, since those handouts end up in rubbish pits without any reading. They also may not be of much help to the physically less fortunate society.

These documents contain varying information depending on the target groups. If the publishers wish to inform people on preventive measures of various diseases, the information of the handouts will be on prevention. Others may be educative on types of diseases or even symptoms of various diseases. Some of the articles at times may be just to encourage the sick people and give them hope of healing from their sicknesses.

Much as these handouts are meant for the sickly people. They are not only given to sick people. They are also given to healthy people to whom awareness needs to be created. These people can be found in hospitals as patients or healthy but caring for the sick. They may also be found in their homes, places of work or any other place, by people paid by these organizations to distribute the handouts.

Patient education handouts have over time proven useful. Many health organizations have recommended for their use and are championing for its implementation. People also running their own private hospitals, especially those concerned more with quality patient care than money generation, have already put this method into practice for better service delivery.




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