The education of health care professionals in the year 2000 and beyond: Part 1: The consumer's view.
In summary, consumers desire health care professionals with interpersonal communication skills; with ability to interpret nonverbal communication or body language beyond gross facial gestures; and with effective questioning techniques for taking family histories quickly and accurately yet uncovering some client feelings and life-style difficulties in the process. Consumers want health care professionals who know how to mobilize clients' personal healing resources through greater understanding of how the immune system functions and who know how to deliver difficult diagnoses to clients in a positive, challenging manner and involve the clients in the course of their own body's healing. They desire significantly more information and guidelines about nutrition, weight management, and the complex biochemical interactions associated with food, medication, and the combination of the two. Consumers want health care professionals with greater understanding of sleep and its effect on health and of biofeedback, hypnosis, exercise, meditation, relaxation, and support groups as disease-fighting tools. The genetic components of illness and wellness and how clients cope with some of the built-in genetic weaknesses must receive greater attention. The influence of the environment and pollutants on human health must be addressed. How to maintain health among an aging population, and utilizing norm data that is age specific, gender specific, and developmentally and socioculturally specific is essential to address. An emphasis shift is necessary towards healing and wellness. When we do all this, we still have to make it cost effective. What a challenge! How then can health care professionals be where the consumer wants them to be? How can professionals be responsive to their own human needs as well as those of the consumer? How can the faculty preparing health care professionals incorporate the dimensions outlined by futurists and by consumers by the year 2000? The answer lies in the curriculum solution to be developed in Part II of this presentation. The curriculum solution will explicate a human need theory/process-oriented approach to professional education and practice, assuring the consumer of a person-/family-/community-centered approach to health care and engendering for the carer a healthy, valued self and improved services. Trust your heart ... Never deny it a hearing. It is the kind of house oracle that often foretells the most important.
Yura-Petro
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Old Dominion University, School of Nursing, Norfolk, VA.
Scanelli
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D001294:Attitude to Health; D003142:Communication; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D005544:Forecasting; D006282:Health Personnel / Q000193:education* / Q000592:standards / Q000639:trends; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000639:trends; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000639:trends*; D006694:Holistic Health; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D014481:United States