Introduction
Diversity in patients and societies means that they have different medical needs and risk factors. This diversity means that the teaching requirements cannot be the same for everyone. There is, therefore, a need for different teaching methods and health promotion strategies. These different teaching strategies cause different approaches to education. With the patients’ different views, there is a need to develop new and different ways to overcome the resistance and needs.
Impact of Diversity on Approach to Education
Diversity in the people means that people have different risk factors for specific diseases. They, therefore, have various health threats according to these risk factors (Irvine, 2010). When teaching about health promotion, one focuses on teaching them how to avoid contracting a disease that they are most likely to contract. For example, some part of the population is most likely to contract diabetes. There is, therefore, a need to know what type of population one is dealing with. Nurses, therefore, develop a fact file on the focus population. They require enough data on the community to know what to teach and what to focus on. Some of the data the nurses need include the most prevalent diseases or conditions and the risk factors of these diseases, among other factors.
The nurses then need to examine the best health promotion model that fits the community. The development of health promotion models has assisted nurses in finding the best-fitting model easily. Some models can be used, and where they cannot fit, the new ones are to be developed or the old ones reconstructed to meet the communities’ needs (Healthy People in Healthy Communities: A Community Planning Guide Using Healthy People, 2010). In some instances, there has been a need to teach nurses new techniques for handling a specific part of the population. Diversity has, therefore, led to health education being reconstructed and subdivided. The differences have led to the development of models that will make health promotion easier for nurses.
Overcoming Differing Viewpoints
The most important thing to know when teaching people with various viewpoints is who they are. Nurses need to learn more about their audience during health promotion to know what they can expect from their audience. Having more information about their beliefs and culture enables the nurses to understand why they have that type of view on different issues. Data is one of the essential parts of nursing, and therefore nurses need more information on their audience for them to be able to deal with their differing viewpoints (Irvine, 2010). In other words, there is a need to research more about them so that you may have more information about the patients.
The other strategy is listening to their viewpoints and perhaps, at times, reasoning with them. It is very prudent for a nurse to listen to their audience and hear their views on things. This is because the patients and audience at times, are right. Their viewpoints may also carry a lot of information in them and explain specific issues, such as why the community is suffering from a specific disease (Healthy People in Healthy Communities: A Community Planning Guide Using Healthy People, 2010). For example, a patient with diabetes can provide you with information about how he takes his health, and you can know why he is suffering from another disease.
Nurses have also tried to go to the ground and live with the community to know more about the patients. This is very helpful when it comes to providing information that relies on perspective. For example, people may feel that they take clean water, but it is not until the nurse sees it will the nurse knows if it is clean or not. This is perhaps the most efficient as the nurses can learn about their patients through observation, and they can, from there, know how they think and do things and why they have differing viewpoints (Irvine, 2010).
References
Healthy People in Healthy Communities: A Community Planning Guide Using Healthy People 2010. (n.d.). PsycEXTRA Dataset. doi:10.1037/e567272010-001
Irvine, F. (2010). Contextualizing Health Promotion. Health Promotion and Health Education in Nursing, 1-21. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-21464-5_1
