Cast & Curious

Tag: health education

  • Patient Education via social media- what sticks and what’s (probably) fake….

    Advocates has long championed social media as a tool for patient education in healthcare. Social media was taunted to increase meaningful patient engagements, an increase health practitioners’ and patient collaborations that would result to improvements in the various facets of healthcare- from physician-patient relationships, quality point of care to increase in surveillance of less familiar but equality important health disease and issues. The use of social media for health education also enabled patient’s (or his / her support community) navigate a complex rapidly changing health system and thus improve his or her quality of life.

    Patient health education via social media needed a critical reflection however. Although there are studies looking at its effect as a tool for health learning,  the results are quite inconclusive. Is it the methods of teaching? The target learner? Or are the the metrics used? There seem to be a confusion on what constitute an effective social media tool for health learning in the general populace.

    From an educators standpoint, the use social media as a tool for learning is a characteristic of connectivist pedagogy of teaching and learning. This theory came about as a result of rapidly changing, many-to-many type of communication and web 2.0 (social media) technologies. If social media is to be effectively used as a tool for teaching and learning of patients in healthcare, one must learn the nuance of this pedagogy and the context of what a typical (Filipino) health learner is. Also, such learning does and goes beyond formal traditional, institutional learning that we knew and have gone through. This author believe, such belong to lifelong learning and is a must learn for healthcare educators to be effective.

    Or, we get fake news, misinformation and worst harm patients and the general public with its inappropriate use

    In this chat,#HealthXPh will discuss health educational technologies and designs with educational healthcare social media pioneers to find that appropriate method of using social media as a tool for health education. Thus, the objectives of this discussion/chat are

    (1) Characterise what constitute typical (Filipino) health learner that are probably receptive to social media as a tool for healthcare learning. 

    (2)Identify educational designs (or pedagogies) of teaching and learning that are appropriate for patient education in the context of health.  

    (3) Give example of patient learner education  design that you ( or someone you know)  effectively applied in practice.

    The following are the guide questions for our chat:

    T1. What characterize a typical health learner that is receptive to social media as a tool for learning?

    T2. What teaching and learning strategy that uses social media as tool is most apt for this typical health learner?

    T3. Give a health teaching strategy using social media that you have applied to practice? What were the results?

    I am aware that objectives and question number one are often labelled as stereotyping.  For most educators, contextualizing learning to a particular set of learners is a must to be effective. Thats all there is to “characterising learners” in education.

    Join us later 9:00 PM Manila time as #HealthXPh listens to experts as we discuss patient health education via social media!

  • Teaching the “right” attitude and values to would be doctors

    There are several methods of curriculum development in medical education. I’m familiar with Kern’s Six Step Approach to Curriculum Development which I discussed  briefly in this post. This approach is far from perfect but components of medical education ( knowledge, skills, attitudes and values) may be effectively taught using this approach.

    Kern's 6 Step Approach
    Kern’s 6 Step Approach to Curriculum Development

    On top of of this Six Step Approach is a well conducted general needs assessment of the community where health professionals are to be deployed. This needs assessment also determines the context that wrap health issues in that specific community. Implementing a health education program without prior contextual needs assessment is like running a car without a definite destination. Resources are spread thin across multiple objectives, draining resources and produce graduates who are “misfits”- physicians who just don’t fit the target community’s context of health issues. A misfit health professional so to speak.

    For years I believe, our goals for educating health professionals didn’t change much and remained true to the ideals of health profession. We still want to train ethical and moral health professionals serving our country in the most excellent and conscientious way. Our instruments in achieving these goals however have changed dramatically in todays digital age. Access to information greatly improved but processing these information lags behind. We have access to western health research but such data just don’t fit especially in the countryside where the context of health issues is radically different. We train our would be physicians that western medical knowledge and skills is the way to go in medicine but what is in the books and journals are vastly different from what we have here on the ground. The stark difference is even more palpable in the attitude and values being taught at healthcare academe. We have forgotten the socio cultural context of our health issues. We train highly skilled and knowledgeable physicians yet they don’t seem to fit the community they’re placed in. Most of them just gravitate towards the urban tertiary centers where western medicine, the context of how we train them, resides.

    Teaching medical knowledge and skills has evolved so much in recent decades.  Attitudes and values however remains the hardest, most elusive component teach and assess. Thus we hear of health professionals who’s attitudes and values are way off what’s expected of a health professional. Whispers of “lazy, easily discouraged, whiner, scum” health professionals  can sometimes be heard on performance evaluations.  The lack of a clear context and need assessments predisposes a program to produce such health professionals.  The lack of validated instruments to impart and assess our methods of teaching attitudes and values in our health education programs remains challenge to the medical academe. We’ve tried teaching methods like “fellowships” or paired didactic/clinical exposures, increasing patient exposures, community immersions  and other but we yet to figure out exactly how to teach and assess desirable attitudes and values to our health professionals.  We knew teaching methods are customised  on the context of the community and cannot be standardized across regional difference. Perhaps a basic framework to work on and modified regionally according to context would be a good way to start.

    So far, a standard method of evaluating attitudes of health professionals needs to be implemented and validated widely.  The closest we can get after going through the rigodon of trying to each time, is the multi peer assessment. This is an assessment method wherein everyone in the health professionals working environment gives an assessment as to the attitude of that health professional.   The assessment is quite comprehensive and is reflective  the working atmosphere of that health professionals. It is however tedious. Categorising components of this assessment tool and making sure everyone in the working environment uniformly understand its content requires training.

    In summary, our goals in teaching the “right” attitude for health professionals, hasn’t changed much in the past decades. The lack of clear context and needs assessment plus the scarcity of teaching and assessing ” attitudes and values ” among our health professionals is contributing much to “misfits” in the health community. A multi peer assessment is the closest tool we can use but is tedious and time consuming. A basic framework for training should be created on a national level but modified regionally according to the specific context of health issues present in that region.