A decision-making process for planning patient education.

Health professionals tend to resist incorporating education into their patient-care activities despite increasing evidence that educating patients in self-care management can favorably influence health outcomes. Moreover, health professionals often lack skill and expertise in developing patient- education plans. To remedy this situation a new method was developed for teaching health professionals how to integrate patient education into the patient's plan of care. Using the guided design approach, a project was adapted to teach health professionals how to plan patient education for the person with diabetes mellitus. In this method health professionals work as members of a team to address a particular patient's educational needs in a real-life situation. More than 250 health professionals have participated in a two-hour workshop utilizing this project. It provides participants with a systematic approach for planning patient education and gives them practice in writing an individualized patient-education plan that takes into consideration the patient's overall needs and goals. This instructional method not only has helped health professionals differentiate patient goals (outcomes) from health professional actions (process) but also has provided health professionals with the opportunity to learn how to work together. The benefit of the "team experience" was the one participants most often identified as having the greatest value. This paper includes a description of the project, a copy of the guided design tool, and specific instructions for its use to enable others to try this method.