Best Practices in Patient Education: Striving Toward Optimal Health Outcomes

Course overview

Patient education is essential to assist healthcare consumers to obtain the knowledge and ability to achieve optimal health outcomes (Bastable, 2017, p. 542). This course is based on the Patient Education Practice Guidelines for Health Care Professionals developed by the Health Care Education Association (HCEA) to provide concise direction for healthcare professionals. HCEA is an interprofessional organization comprised of healthcare educators focused on using evidence-based education to improve healthcare outcomes. More than 10,000 publications were reviewed to identify evidence-based practice strategies. The patient education process consists of four components (APIE) (Bastable, 2017): Assessment, Planning, Implementation , Evaluation Each of these components is essential for effective patient education.