Читать книгу Patient Education: You Can Do It! - Ginger Kanzer-Lewis - Страница 7

For over 35 years, I have been teaching health care professionals to teach. At first, they were nurses that I recruited to work in an inservice or staff development department. Fifteen years later, I found I could identify wonderful people and help develop diabetes educators and later patient educators. Little did I know that it would be a life-changing experience and ultimately lead me to the presidency of the American Association of Diabetes Educators.

This transition occurred because I turned down a job. I had interviewed for the position of Director of the Diabetes Teaching Nurses, as they were then called, at the Joslin Clinic in Boston. I had recently gotten my master’s degree in Education at Harvard University, and there were very few nurses at that time with credentials in education. Adult Education was a new field and many people had not even heard about it as a specialty. I had also been in Staff Development and Education for 15 years and felt I had a pretty good handle on how to teach patients and how to get other professionals to teach patients. Evidently, Joslin agreed with me, as Denise Stevens offered me the position. I decided that the two-hour commute from New Hampshire was too long and regretfully turned her down. Two weeks later, she called and asked if I would teach an Adult and Patient Education portion for their four-day course for nurses and dietitians. I agreed. For the next 14 years, I taught the last day of that program. I called my section “Patient Education: Just Do It!” I have continued in my private consulting practice to teach that course and for 20 years have intended to put it all down on paper.

This book is a compilation of all the workshops, seminars, and classes I have taught during and since that time and is a practical guide to patient education. I believe it will give you much of the knowledge and skills you will need, tell you why you should teach patients, and tell you how people learn and how to turn them on. It will share with you practical knowledge and skills in developing classes, courses, and programs. It has taken me a lifetime to learn these skills, and I have wanted to give every bit of that information and passion to every educator I have worked with or met. These chapters will help you find easier, better, more fun, exciting, and stimulating ways to teach the same class you have been teaching or have been wanting to teach. There will be practical information that you can use immediately and take some of the fear and frustration that accompanies the new position of educator. For experienced educators, it will be a chance to reminisce, share, and laugh and perhaps learn a new trick or two or acquire a new idea or concept.

This is an opportunity to examine new ways to do the thing we love best. Teach patients.

This book includes all of the things I have learned from the best teachers in the world, patients and educators. I discovered that I learn every time I teach anyone anything and that is truly a gift. In the chapter on games and exercises, you will find out about my friends. I sent a call out to diabetes educators and asked them to share a game, exercise, or trick that they have learned in their personal practices. Many of them sent me their treasures and I have included them, with great joy, in my book. The reader will be the better for their knowledge and friendship. Enjoy.

I found a love of teaching early on in my career and to my great surprise a deep affinity for it. I remember, as a student nurse, an instructor telling me to consider going into nursing education. Evelyn Zalewski suggested it, and I laughed and told her I loved obstetrical nursing and that was where I would spend my career. She then told me something that I have shared with thousands of colleagues when trying to convince them to teach patients. “As long as someone remembers something you have said you are immortal.” So many of my patients are immortal, for I remember something from everyone I have ever met.

My career has been, is, and will be an opportunity to do what I love best. I have been blessed!