Students Awareness of Health Teaching: Evaluation of "Health Education" Course and the Occupational Health Nursing Practice

The "health education" course is an important part of the baccalaureate curriculum in nursing. It is essential to teach students effective health education in a client oriented way. In order to improve the quality and content of this course, we extracted students descriptions from records of 44 students who had carried out group health education during nursing practice for the occupational health nursing course. We then analyzed students written sentences on their views concerning health teaching. After sentence analysis, we categorized these concepts into groups and titled them. The results of clarification of categories showed that the most common student awareness was in regard to technical and instructional skills, such as precise and suitable language selection for laymen, and utilization of teaching devices or mediums, during implementation of health teaching (43.6%). Secondly, assessment of health needs for a certain working population (10.3%), and effective teaching types such as instructional participant volunteers and full participation (9.2%) were deemed important. Thirdly, identification of the role of the occupational nurse (7.7%), and lastly the necessity of evaluation (2.3%) were considered necessary. Over all, in this study we found that students were most concerned about the instructional skills during the presentation of health education. Also, these results suggest that development of contents in the "health education" course to reinforce students assessment and evaluative abilities should be incorporated into the course. Furthermore, faculties who teach a "health education" course should provide a large variety of teaching materials and creative instructional methods for the students.