Narrative Learning Theory Paper

The nurse is always looking for ways to educate the patient. To be effective at educating the patient, the nurse must be willing and able to combine assorted styles and methods to help teach additional information. The nurse will have more success in this teaching role if she understands learning theories and which ones to apply in different populations (Nies and McEwen, 2015). The purpose of this post is to describe a learning theory which would be well suited when providing teaching to an adult population in my community who have cardiovascular disease and need education on lowering blood pressure levels.

The theory that I chose for my population is cognitive learning theory which is defined as a focus on thinking, understanding, and consciousness

(Aliakbari, Parvin, Heidari & Haghani, 2015). Using this learning style, the patient will review new learned information and compare it with prior learning to assimilate a new thought on a subject (Aliakbari et al., 2015). I would choose this method since the adult will already have some knowledge of health and food choices. They would also benefit from sitting in a group of like aged members and hearing how others interpret the information being provided. I would pick a target group of no more than twelve people, ages 65 and over, meeting in the hospital education center. The first teaching strategy I would use would be a free training session to teach the proper way to take a blood pressure using an electronic device, this would also include a free pamphlet to record readings to be shared with the primary physician at visits. The second strategy would be to have a variety of foods with labels and teach how to read labels for sodium content. I would also provide a handout guideline for recommended daily consumption of sodium and encourage the patients to ask their doctor what their daily consumption should be.
In conclusion, the community health nurse spends a great amount of time educating patients. The nurse can improve community health by providing education which can decrease a health risk for a given disease. The nurse may be asked to teach on a variety of topics, but the real task will always be how to teach the information based on the needs of the patient. The community nurse will need to be aware of learning theories and how to combine them as needed to accomplish teachings.