Patient education - Health Teaching

Medicine is indeed a discipline that requires so much hard work and diligence. Medicine whether being taught in the traditional way or conveyed through a problem-based learning approach, patient education has always been one of its essential domain. Patient education is no doubt but a process whereby health professionals impart information to patients and their significant others with an end goal of altering their health behaviors or improving their health status. Health teaching has been the most favoured way by which the goal of patient education can be evaluated.

It can be said that during the ancient times, stories or narratives were used in transmitting crucial information to people but within the parlance of the medical profession this is not the case. The seemingly endless lists of dos and donts’s, numbers and figures, drawings and illustrations are then utilized instead to induce behavioural change.

When the group of 8 medical students decided to embark in the concept of health teaching, ultimately their goal was to increase the knowledge of the community residents of Barangay Bacuyong. The topics that were discussed and explained include water purification methods, hypertension and tuberculosis respectively.

The preparation for a health teaching assembly was not an easy task especially if it was done per purok. The group had to carefully scrutinize every detail of the topics to be discussed making sure that every bit of information was pretty much very easy to discern with meticulous concern of the educational background of the intended audience. True enough; the group had encountered some difficulties while in the process of doing the activity. Some community residents had trouble with their vision while some also had problems with their hearing. In fact, even some were not able to read! Every member in the group bridged the gap by providing assistance to these individuals just to ensure the reliability of the results of their pretest and posttest. Despite the unforeseen stress and the humid weather, these group of 8 medical students held strong and accomplished their task beating the set deadline.

With so much pride and elation, the group was very happy about the results of their health teaching and indeed there was a remarkable increase in knowledge in all of the 3 topics deliberated to the community residents. It just proved one thing, that the group did a great job. Being able to equip the community residents with the right kind of knowledge is just tantamount to empowering them in taking care of their own health.