Effective Patient Education

Name of StudentDate of submission
Subject
Effective Patient Education: Atherosclerosis Brochure
Many health professionals believe and practice that in order to achieve agreeable results, the patients are supposed to be well-educated regarding the particular disease or illness they may have (CDC, 2011). If the patients were well aware of the what is happening, going to happen or might happen to them, it has been discovered that they are more complaint with the health professionals (Falvo, 2011). A patient's cooperation helps yield a more positive result when it comes to patient care. Therefore, patient education is of great importance. This has already been seen by the country which is why initiatives such as Healthy People 2010 and the coming, Healthy People 2020 are being promoted by the government to its people.
In ensuring patient education, a creative and understanding mind is needed. Understanding is needed to help the health professional relay the proper and the needed information to the patient. In most cases, patients and health professionals have a hard time understanding each other since patients are not very much akin to medicine and health. Consequently, there are many jargon in the medical and health field that are difficult to explain to non-medical people. This tends to create a misunderstanding and a gap between the patient and the health professional. Because of such, the health professional tends to provide incomplete information to the patient just as so they would understand each other. Therefore, understanding in both sides is needed.
Creativity, then, helps this understanding be firm. A creative mind, for the health professional, is needed so that information is relayed in a way that the non-medical patient would grasp the idea of the disease of the illness. A health professional may give a long and detailed lecture about the disease but the patient would not understand the concept. On the other hand, brochures, health pamphlets and other instructional tools may help the patient understand the idea of the disease.
In this particular task, I made a brochure regarding the blood vessel condition known as atherosclerosis. This disease is very important to understand because (1) it can hit anyone, (2) it is the cause of about 75% cardiovascular related deaths in the country and (3) it has already affected about 80% of Americans from 30 years of age and above (University of Maryland Medical Center, n.d.).
Atherosclerosis is a condition in which the arterial wall thickens and hardens which promotes the back flow of blood to the heart via the artery (University of Maryland Medical Center, n.d.; WebMD, n.d.; Holt, n.d. ). Normally, the artery has a flexible wall to allow the passage of blood coming from the heart to the other parts of the body. The veins tend to have a difficult time pushing blood back to the heart, therefore blood is increases in the arteries. In order to contain this increase in blood, t...