Importance Of Education In Health Care

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Aristotle once said, “The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead”. Education is a process of learning new information and putting that information into practice. For example, educating oneself on a new diagnosis of hypertension or diabetes and how to manage it. By becoming familiar with the disease process, this can lead to individuals learning to manage their symptoms and have healthier outcomes. The following information has been gathered to show the importance of education in the health care field, and how education as a social determinant of health can affect the livelihood of different populations. In the article, Education: A Missed Opportunity for Public Health Intervention, the importance of …show more content…

They discuss the importance of literacy and how it influences lifestyle. Literacy, they say, is “related to multiple aspects of health including knowledge about health, personal health status and the use of health services (Low et al., 2005, p. 1138). The idea that using literacy to understand health and personal health status can allow the individual to educate themselves on what is healthy vs. non healthy. Education on the use of health services allows the individual to understand how the health care system works to aid those who are in need. For example, knowing whether or not one needs to visit the emergency room or rather stay home and treat the symptoms. Literacy helps one to understand that emergency departments are available to treat true emergencies like a car wreck, and not one’s runny nose and nausea. By using literacy to become more educated, this can lead to better jobs, higher incomes, and potentially a better outlook on life. It is easy to see that lower educated people can be at risk for lower poverty, poor schooling and can live in more rural …show more content…

The authors go on to say that these individuals who were struggling with managing their diabetes felt that the disease process was too complex to understand. Also, they felt that seeing images of how diabetes affects the body’s organ systems seemed to help them better understand than by reading a traditional textbook (Hill et al., 2015). This leads one to think that if the participants in the study could have stayed in school longer, perhaps they could have honed in on the ways to study that helped them best succeed. Maybe they would have realized they were visual learners who needed images or models and this could have lined them up for success in later life. So at this point in their lives, it is important to provide them with the aides that will best prepare them to be educated about their disease, such as information with pictures of body systems affected by diabetes like the eyes and kidneys. This is not meant to offend the learner, but it becomes more of an individualized plan to help one

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