Opinion: RNs Teach While Providing Care
Monday November 16, 2009
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Eileen P. Williamson, RN
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Almost everything we do for patients can involve a teaching technique, whether we’re giving information or instructions, demonstrating something, having patients practice and give return demonstrations, or asking and answering questions. We teach everything from diet, exercise, and safe medication administration, to hygiene, disease prevention, wellness, and follow-up from the moment we admit and assess patients until we give them their discharge instructions.
We teach at bedsides, in doctors’ offices, clinics, and even in homes — where with the aid of new patient monitoring technology we can continue to reach and teach them remotely. We teach families and caregivers as well as patients. We use age-appropriate and culturally-sensitive approaches to teaching. We adjust our care based on patients’ learning needs, and include emotional, social, ethical, financial, and legal issues along with the physical. So even if we’ve never stood at the front of a classroom, as nurses we are teachers.
There also are those among us who have done all of this informal teaching, and then chosen to devote themselves more fully to the formal kind by going into the classroom as professors of nursing, either full time or as adjunct faculty, educating their colleagues and students who will become their colleagues. Others choose to do it in education departments of healthcare institutions and businesses, in seminars, and in continuing education programs. How fortunate it is for our patients and our profession that we are educators. Without the skills and devotion of nurse educators, the profession of nursing would be different.
Because of the wonderful, innovative ways nursing education and practice are being advanced, it’s the perfect opportunity for us to celebrate nurses as teachers. Because November is Home Care Month, it’s also the perfect opportunity for us to salute our home care nurses, who in varied and challenging settings outside of the classroom and beyond the hospital, truly epitomize the role of nurse as teacher. Home care nurses provide holistic and individualized care custom fit to each individual’s setting and condition, and there are countless patients who are glad they do.
Speaking of being glad, I’m pleased I made that recent gift shop visit to remind me how proud I am to be a nurse. Maybe one day soon I, or perhaps you, will visit another little gift shop somewhere and see a plaque that reads, “To Nurse is to Teach.”
Eileen P. Williamson, RN, MSN, is vice president of Nursing Communications & Initiatives. To comment, e-mail ewilliamson@gannetthg.com.
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