DEVELOPING AND EVALUATING EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS

Developing and Evaluating Educational programs

Developing and Evaluating Educational Program

Introduction

The Veterans Health Administration is a health organization of United States; it is the largest health care system in the United States. It consists of 152 medical centers and 1400 community based outpatient clinics, Domiciliary, Vet centers and community living centers. It has strength of 53,000 licensed health care practitioners who serve around 8.3 million Veterans every year.

Veteran Administration Nursing provides the largest cooperative education opportunities and training in association with graduate and undergraduate programs at numerous universities and colleges. It provides clinical experience to every one of the four nursing professionals in the country. VA Nursing provides valued team members who help with their knowledge and expertise in the care of patients. VA nurses also play a significant role emergency, planning, preparedness, response and recovery. VA has a significant contribution in research and technological innovations in the field of nursing.

Discussion

I am a nurse at Veterans Hospital. The hospital deals in multiple disciplines of medical science, the domain covered in my subject area of interest is nursing. We deal approximately 100, 000 patients every year. The patients are of inpatient and outpatient primary care. The inpatient primary care patients are of acute and critical level.

A research was conducted amongst the adult patients who used the facility of nursing at Veterans hospital and it was analyzed that the most common topics of interest for the patients are COPD, CHF and Chest pain. These nurses lack educational expertise in these subjects of medical science as evaluated from the recent survey conducted. I will define an educational assessment paper, which will define the teaching methodologies which will be incorporated to improve the knowledge of nurses for the illnesses of COPD, CHF and Chest Pain. Similarly a parallel teaching procedure to aware the patients about these illnesses will be developed.

Selecting an effective teaching strategy is of prime importance when designing an educational program. Yet no teaching strategy can be considered ideal to teach the nurses about illness and its characteristics. However, it is considered the nurse should be taught physical, psychological and cognitive development of patients facing chest pain, CHF and COPD. The selection of the teaching strategy is dependent upon the learning outcome of the problem. Traditional teaching strategies were to brief nurses through lectures, group discussions, demonstration and practical activities. Interactive methodologies of cross word puzzles, quiz and computer aided instructions also do benefit.

The method to train the nurses for education in this concern about COPD, CHF and Chest pain will be diverse in teaching. Firstly the nurses will be provided with hard copy of detailed lectures about the topics, they will be trained by highly knowlded and expert professionals of each individual subject of chest pain, COPD and CHF (Buttell, 2004).

The training session will be using the technology of audio visuals and the students of the program will witness recorded videos of patients when they will be defining the symptoms they face, the visual clip will be followed ...