Fundamentals of Pedagogy and Psychoeducational Aspects in Health Care

The overall objective of the course is to develop the fundamental knowledge to promote and support, together with the action of other health professions, educational activities within primary prevention and health promotion interventions and, in secondary and tertiary prevention interventions, to improve adherence to treatment and therapeutic-rehabilitation pathways for patients with both organic and mental illnesses. To date, in fact, advances in medicine, improvements in terms of the effectiveness of treatments and therapies and the consequent increase in life expectancy are changing the demand for and management of care and treatment, placing clinicians in front of chronic diseases that require complex multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary interventions, in which psycho-pedagogical implications are relevant and essential.

At the completion of the course the student will be able to:
- Discuss the connections between the psychologist's activities in health care settings and educational work
- Outline the meaning of "education" and its fundamental characteristics, declining these characteristics in the health care context
- Clarify the centeredness of relationship in educational interventions
- Define pedagogy and indicate the difference with education
- Clarify similarities and differences between pedagogy and andragogy
- Point out the differences and similarities between the different concepts of teaching, training, didactics, science of education, philosophy of education
- Illustrate the difference between formal, nonformal, and informal education, then declining it in the healthcare setting
- Illustrate the concept of health in its historical evolution, starting with the first who definition in 1948, highlighting its educational dimensions
- Indicate the similarities and differences between the activities of health education, health education and health promotion
- Expose the main characteristics of health promotion interventions with a bottom-up approach, giving examples of them
- Describe the main pedagogical features of a peer education intervention, giving examples of the areas in which this approach has been used
- Explain the connection between models of medicine and educational models
- Explain the meaning of "patient information," "patient teaching," "patient education," and "therapeutic patient education," clarifying similarities and differences
- Explain the meaning of "educational diagnosis" and the different models proposed in the literature, indicating the elements that must be considered in its formulation
- Indicate the factors that most impact patient adherence to treatment
- Describe the process of teaching the patient, starting from the analysis of training needs to the evaluation of the results achieved
- Describe the main patient teaching techniques proposed in the literature, giving examples of experiences of proven effectiveness
- Illustrate advantages and disadvantages of individual and group interventions, providing examples of teaching (individual or group) and education (individual or group) from the literature
- Clarify the different skills involved in different educational interventions (teaching and education)
- Illustrate the significance of narrative medicine in patient education
- Explain why it is important to help patients integrate illness into their identity and discuss the educational and self-educational dimensions of this intervention
- Illustrate the characteristics of psychoeducational and social support approaches, providing examples
- Illustrate the characteristics of autobiographical approaches to patient education, providing examples
- Describe the main features of educational work with patients with mental health problems, in the context of tertiary prevention
- Explain how, from a pedagogical perspective, care professionals should construct pedagogical knowledge about educational activities in health care settings.