How Nurse Educators Can Improve Patient Outcomes
The overarching goal of any medical facility is to provide the most positive patient outcomes possible. While nurse educators often focus on teaching in academic or clinical training settings rather than providing hands-on care, the critical knowledge and skills they impart play a vital role in improving patient outcomes. Here’s how the work that nurse educators do contributes to better medical care.
The Importance of Patient Education in Health Care
Simply put, nurse educators help those providing direct patient care apply knowledge and skills in ways that will benefit their patients — who, ideally, have been effectively educated in order to make informed decisions about their health. Through targeted training, nurse educators help caregivers communicate complex medical information clearly, fostering patient understanding and compliance with treatment plans.
What Is the Role of a Nurse Educator in a Hospital Setting?
Nurse educators work as instructors and professional development specialists, helping hospital staff gain and maintain skills necessary for providing high-quality, patient-centered care. Their roles can include instructing, assessing training needs, and designing and implementing training programs.
They may work with all levels of nurses, including licensed practical nurses (LPN), licensed vocational nurses (LVN), registered nurses (RN), and advanced practice registered nurses (APRN). In some cases, nurse educators could instruct those with Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) or nursing PhD degrees, usually providing expertise in a specific area. Nurse educators themselves frequently have a master’s degree in nursing education.
The instruction that nurse educators provide often bridges theory and practice. While they may sometimes lead continuing education units (CEUs) on classic nursing subjects (e.g. pharmacology), more often their courses and seminars are tailored to specific fields or issues.
For example, nurse educators might instruct hospital staff on:
- Maternal and newborn nursing, pediatric nursing, geriatric nursing, etc.
- Critical care nursing, emergency nursing, mental health nursing, etc.
- Nursing ethics, nursing research, etc.
- Telemedicine, health care technology, etc.
- Other nursing subjects
Ways Nurse Educators Help Improve Patient Outcomes
Nurse educators help hospitals enhance patient outcomes in a number of significant ways. They provide a diverse array of educational opportunities, and there’s perhaps no level of provider who has more patient contact than nurses. Involved in nearly every aspect of patient care, it’s nurses who are continually looking after patients during their admissions.
Teaching Nurses to Provide Clear and Effective Patient Education
Translating medical information into simple terms that patients easily understand can be difficult. There are technical terms to explain, specific instructions and occasionally quite complicated matters that patients need to clearly comprehend.
Clear and effective communication is essential in every aspect of patient care—from intake to discharge. Nurses are often responsible for explaining medical information, reviewing prescription instructions, and answering patients’ questions. Nurse educators play a vital role in preparing nurses to communicate clearly and confidently, ensuring patients receive the information they need to make informed decisions about their health.
Nurse educators prepare nursing-level staff for informing patients. They provide communication techniques, ways to check for understanding and methods to overcome language or other barriers. Educators are familiar with relevant resources, too, including online resources, visual aids and agencies that may help patients.
Reducing Medical Errors Through Comprehensive Training
Courses and seminars on subjects like medication safety, infection control and documentation remind nurses of best practices when it comes to these areas of patient-centered care. Educators tend to go beyond simple reviews of these subjects, bringing in case studies, advancements in the field and other newer information.
This type of training is often paired with real-world scenarios, either from case studies or anecdotal stories. There may also be opportunities for in-classroom practice. Together, these can assist with real-world application and gaining personal confidence in actually using the material taught.
Strengthening Critical Thinking and Clinical Decision-Making
Clinical decision-making might comprise a specific course on occasion, but more frequently, this and critical thinking are integrated into all the courses that nurse educators teach.
The goal is not just theoretical classroom knowledge but also the ability to apply that to real-world patient care. Application inherently requires these skills, as few real-world scenarios are exactly like examples in textbooks.
Exactly how critical thinking and clinical decision-making are integrated into instruction depends on the teaching materials. It could be anything from working through given scenarios to reviewing early warning signs, going over time-sensitive protocols or giving a decision tree for situations where there isn’t necessarily one clear best option.
In addition to having prepared scenarios, educators field examples from the nurses in their courses. Student-provided examples help nurses apply the material to the specific situations in which they’re caring for patients — learning to improve the outcomes of those particular patients.
Enhancing Patient Safety Through Evidence-Based Practice
Evidence based-research is the foundation for all nursing education and clinical practice. Clinical studies, case studies, reports and papers give credence to their teaching and have both individual and institutional benefits. Individual nurses review and learn best practices that they can employ when caring for patients. Hospitals are able to disseminate some of the latest research findings, ensuring that they’re providing cutting-edge patient care.
Focusing on evidence-based best practices is ideal in every area of patient care, but perhaps none is more important than patient safety. Using studies and reports removes the subjectivity of how best to handle patient safety issues; it shows what works best across situations.
Improving Communication and Teamwork in Health Care Settings
Nurses, in many ways, are the glue that connects everyone involved in a patient’s care. It’s nurses who explain physicians’ orders and interact with family members, and it’s nursing teams that are with patients on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis. Thus, nursing teams' communication and teamwork skills are crucial.
Some of what nurse educators teach focuses on inter-team collaboration. Educators help nurses develop communication skills for conversing with other nurses and other levels of health care providers as well as patients and family members. These skills lead to fewer mistakes, quicker response times, and more coordinated care overall.
Developing Leadership and Advocacy Skills in Nurses
Leadership skills prepare nurses to take initiative when caring for patients, mentor peers in the field, and develop institutional programs that improve their teams’ work. Part in parcel with these are advocacy skills, which enable nurses to speak up about safety concerns, potential improvements and positive changes that would elevate care.
Promoting Cultural Competence and Personalized Care
Even when they have the same medical issues, patients don’t always desire the same care. Diverse cultural backgrounds, religious beliefs, family situations and personal preferences yield different medical decisions.
Nurse educators can address the importance of cultural awareness and sensitivity, showing ways that nurses can take into account the distinct and varying preferences that patients might have. Awareness and sensitivity are key to providing personalized care. They’re also especially essential in hospital settings, where patients from all backgrounds may be admitted.
Encouraging Nurses to Teach and Support Patients in Self-Management
Self-management is key to maintaining all patients’ long-term health and is particularly crucial for those with certain chronic conditions. Nurse educators encourage nurses to talk with patients about self-management in practical ways — such as setting goals, monitoring symptoms and making good lifestyle choices. These give patients tangible and achievable ways to improve their health when not receiving acute care.
Increasing the Use of Technology in Patient Education
Patient-facing medical technology is advancing at a rapid rate. Health care apps, remote symptom monitoring and online videos from providers are just a few examples of how technology is making health care more accessible.
The importance of patient education, when it comes to medical technology, is difficult to understate. To take full advantage of these tools, however, patients need to be familiar with them.
Nurse educators instruct nurses with the latest technology and how to use it. Nurses can then relay this information, teaching patients how apps and other technology can help them personally.
Addressing Health Care Disparities Through Nursing Education
Health care disparities result in poorer outcomes for underserved populations that hospitals treat. Nurse educators illuminate these problems for nurses, along with ways they can take strides to reduce health care disparities within their spheres. Identifying and addressing inequities improves care for the most vulnerable patients.
Learn More: Advance Your Nursing Career With Texas A&M
Are you ready to make a difference that extends beyond the number of patients you’re able to see? As a nurse educator, you’ll help nurses across departments elevate the level of care they provide. In doing so, your positive impact will reach more patients than any singular nurse could see.
If this role could be the next step in your medical career, Texas A&M University’s Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)-Nursing Education prepares nurse educators with the leadership, teaching and technical skills they need to succeed. Reach out today to learn more about how you can help shape the future of nursing and patient care.
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