Psychoeducation is an integral part of the psychiatric mental health nursing role. Educational interventions are utilized in mental health to assist patients with skills they lack or to assist in improving and adding to their knowledge base for disorders, symptoms, or medications. 

Nurses utilize psychoeducation to meet the identified needs of their patients by adapting teaching and learning to the identified patient diagnosis, needs, deficits and educational level.

Psychoeducation builds on the patient’s current level of functioning and builds on this current knowledge base. The nurse assesses a patient’s current skills and readiness to learn. Throughout a patient admission or outpatient treatment this is a continuous process of assessment, goal setting, developing learning activities and evaluating for changes in knowledge and behavior. 

The goal of this assignment is to evaluate your assessment of patient learning needs and to develop a basic learning activity based on your patient needs.

Examples of teaching activities:

Medication teaching for newly prescribed medication

Sleep hygiene

Stress management

Healthy eating for medications with weight gain side effects

Family teaching about signs/symptoms of Mania 

Exercise goals and benefits for mood/depression

Techniques for decreasing anxiety

Strategies for D/A recovery

Family education on the use of Narcan

• Family teaching about managing a mental health crisis

Using the attached form you will complete the identified information outlining your teaching plan for your patient.

Patient demographic information

Mental health diagnosis

Identified learning need for this patient

Explanation of patient current knowledge base

Identified intervention/information to be presented

Rationale for identified interventions

How would you evaluate patient learning?

Patient Teaching Project

Patient Demographics:

Patient Initials: ______

Age: ______

Mental Health Diagnosis:  ________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________

Cultural Considerations: __________________________________________________________

List any identified patient health conditions that may impact learning (vision/hearing; dementia; learning disability): ______________________________________________________________

Identified Learning Needs (Patient/Nurse): 

What is your patient’s current knowledge base related to your identified learning need? How did you determine this?

Outline your identified patient teaching plan. Include information to be presented, rationale for the identified interventions and how you would evaluate successful patient learning or the need for additional teaching?

Mental Health