This is the first post on your Learning Blog. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
The ePortfolio is both a Learning Blog and an Academic Career Portfolio. Use the Learning Blog to document your learning experiences and class assignments each semester. As time goes by, add content to the Academics and Career sections to show your department, graduate institutions, or future employers how well prepared you are for your chosen career.
NOTE: Remember to add appropriate Categories and Tags to your posts. This will help your professors and other visitors find the content they are looking for. The Categories “Coursework” and “Field Trips” and the Tags “OpenLab” and “City Tech” have already been applied to this post. Feel free to make changes!
There are three learning domains: Cognitive, Practical and Affective. Cognitive learning involves knowledge, facts, thinking, information. The cognitive domain refers to intellect. It involves thought, recall, decision making, and drawing conclusions. In this domain the patient uses previous experiences, prior knowledge, and perceptions to give meaning to new information or to alter prior thought perceptions. The Community Nurse can make use of the patient’s cognitive abilities when information is given to the patient or to his/her caregivers about the disease process, disease management, medications/ treatments and there adverse reactions, and even relocation/transfer processes. The patient utilizes their cognitive domain to process the information being given, ask questions, and make decisions. The goal is to ensure that patient’s are making informed decisions about their health care.
Practical learning involves applying your knowledge to a situation. It can also be referred to as psychomotor learning. Similar to practical courses in school, the name suggests “hands-on” learning. This learning domain involves learning physical skills or tasks. The patient can be taught a task or skill using a step by step method. Examples of practical learning could include teaching the patient how to self-inject insulin, take their blood glucose utilizing a glucometer, or monitoring their blood pressure utilizing a blood pressure machine.
They should be allowed the opportunity for “hands-on” practice under the supervision of an appropriate healthcare provider such as a doctor or a nurse. Depending on the Community Nurses qualifications and skill set, the Community Nurse could also supervise the patient performing a return demonstration. The healthcare provider would then assess the patient’s proficiency of the skill.
Affective learning, which is very rarely reached by many healthcare providers, involves the patient and their feelings about what they have just learned. This particular domain includes the patient and at times even the patients’ caregiver’s, attitudes, feelings, beliefs, and opinions. Health care providers often ignore this domain, usually unintentionally.
However its imperative to reach out to this specific aspect of patient teaching. It is extremely effortless to hand out a pre-printed teaching pamphlet or article or guideline off of the computer/ internet. This is more so than not becoming the standard in most healthcare institutions. Generally, the kind of material being handed to the patient or caregiver is often intended to be utilized as a checklist to aide or reinforce prior teaching. These pamphlets or “checklists” are useful in assisting the healthcare provider to remember pertinent facts to be covered while performing the teaching to the patient. It is there for reference and then it is given to the patient for their future reference. These pamphlets or handouts almost never take into account the affective domain of learning.
The most important requirement to learning about a patient’s affective learning domain and their readiness to learn, would be to develop a therapeutic relationship with the patient. This would include a relationship based on trust and caring. Patients are very keen and can sense when healthcare providers are genuine and sincere in their actions and words. Building this relationship early on is vital to paving the foundation to a patient’s readiness to learn.
When one takes the time to develop and build up a therapeutic relationship, both the patient and the caregivers or family have an increased confidence in the information being provided. It is vital to always approach the patient with respect and encourage and urge their expression of thoughts, questions and feelings.
Community nursing is collaborative and interdisciplinary care of a patient. It involves critical thinking, analytical skillsets, assessment of situations, planning interventions and implementing those interventions so that the patient receives exceptional quality standard of care within their current environmental settings. A Community Nurse provides cost effective care with positive outcomes. The care provided is unbiased care as well as the best quality of care possible. Community Nurses take into account the patient’s current status and coordinate resources and care, and sometimes need to negotiate the resources and care. They are responsible for a patient’s speedy but safe discharge.
Community Nurses work with patients, their families/caregivers, community resources and other interdisciplinary teams as well. Their main goal is to ensure a safe but prompt patient discharge, and positive patient outcomes. Another factor they must consider and take action to implement is decreased patient readmissions for the same matter. This aspect of their job involves patient outreach, learning readiness assessment, effective communication skills and effective teaching. They need to empower the patients with chronic diseases to further aide in the patients’ cooperation.
The patient should feel somewhat in control of their health and health increasing behaviors. In order to reach the goal of improved patient outcomes, Case Managers need to clearly and effectively communicate with patients on a level that the patient understands and absorbs the information being provided.