Introduction
It is possible to hypothesize that patient knowledge about the chronic disease they are suffering from might allow for increasing their health outcomes via a variety of mechanisms. This paper proposes an evidence-based project to assess the impact of patient education on health outcomes of the patients educated so.
The idea for an Evidence-Based Project Proposal
The evidence-based project will be proposed for investigation pertains to the impact of providing educational interventions for patients who suffer from various chronic diseases. In terms of PICOT, the problem for the project may be formulated as follows: “In elderly patients with chronic diseases (P), does patient education intervention in addition to medication treatments (I), compared with only medication treatments (C), increase their health knowledge and improve their health status (O) in a period of 6 months (T)?”
The choice of this topic for the proposed project is conditioned by the fact that it is important to find out which ways may allow for effectually improving the health outcomes of individuals with chronic diseases (elderly individuals in particular) to increase their quality of life, as well as to reduce the spending which is required to address their health problems (Smith, Anderson, Salinas, Horvatek, & Baker, 2015). This project reflects the evidence-based approach rather than the research approach because, for its completion, it will be needed to test the proposed educational intervention in practice and gather the evidence of its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness), rather than conduct a theoretical investigation of the issues about the given topic.
The Issue to Be Addressed, the Proposed Intervention and the Expected Outcomes
As follows from the PICOT problem formulated above, the proposed project will address the issue of improving the health outcomes of elderly individuals with chronic diseases via implementing an educational intervention. Such interventions, in theory, should be important and effective, for it is logical to assume that individuals with chronic diseases need to be aware of various aspects of these illnesses to be able to appropriately deal with them, gradually curing them or preventing them from taking more severe forms (Smith et al., 2015).
To design the educational interventions, it is possible to utilize the approach proposed by Skelton, Waterman, Davis, Peipert, and Fish (2015), and to design personally tailored educational interventions to help them to gain knowledge about the concrete diseases that they suffer from. However, it should be noted that patients that will be selected should have similar chronic health problems to permit for making a meaningful comparison between the experimental group (medication and educational intervention) and the control group (medication only).
It is expected that providing patients with the educational intervention will allow for helping them realize the nuances of their chronic disease, thus improving the adherence to health management procedures (via increasing the degree of their realization of the severity of their diseases), and, consequently, improving their health outcomes in comparison to the control group (Skelton et al., 2015).
The relevance of the Project to the Nurse Practitioner Specialization
The proposed project is relevant to the specialization of a nurse practitioner because it allows for assessing the importance of providing patient education, and for evaluating the impact of patient awareness of various nuances of their diseases. If the effectiveness of patient education is confirmed, it will provide additional evidence that nurse practitioners should strive to supply their patients with high-quality educational interventions to improve their health outcomes.
Conclusion
On the whole, it should be stressed that patient education may allow for considerably increasing the health outcomes of patients with chronic illnesses. The proposed evidence-based project might permit practically assessing the effectiveness of a particular approach to patient education for improving the health outcomes of elderly patients with chronic diseases.
References
Skelton, S. L., Waterman, A. D., Davis, L. A., Peipert, J. D., & Fish, A. F. (2015). Applying best practices to designing patient education for patients with end-stage renal disease pursuing kidney transplant. Progress in Transplantation, 25(1), 77-90.
Smith, W. C., Anderson, E., Salinas, D., Horvatek, R., & Baker, D. P. (2015). A meta-analysis of education effects on chronic disease: The causal dynamics of the Population Education Transition Curve. Social Science & Medicine, 127, 29-40.