Nursing Assignment: Evaluating Learning Theories for Smoking Cessation

This nursing assignment delves into the application of learning theories in patient education, specifically focusing on a 56-year-old asthmatic patient, Meryl, who smokes. The assignment explores the suitability of behaviorism theory to encourage smoking cessation. It explains how behaviorism, with its emphasis on environmental stimuli, rewards, and punishments, can be applied to reshape Meryl's habits. The assignment discusses the three steps of behaviorism: observation, imitation, and reinforcement. Furthermore, it incorporates literature reviews to support the effectiveness of behaviorism in healthcare settings. The assignment concludes by outlining three key learning outcomes, including the patient's understanding of smoking's impact, self-motivation, and the reinforcement of positive health habits. The aim is to illustrate how nurses can use learning strategies to promote positive behavioral changes and improve patient health outcomes.

Running head: NURSING
RELEVANT THEORIES AND STRATEGIES FOR A SPECIFIC CLIENT CONTEXT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Patient education is one of the most important roles for nursing professionals in today’s
medical profession (de Boer, Delnoij & Rademakers, 2013). This practice is important as
educating patients regarding their health concerns can make them more responsible for their own
health status. Hence, patient education should be comprehensive and easily understandable
(Schulz & Nakamoto, 2013). There are different learning theories that can be used for such
patient education and their health outcomes such as behaviorism, constructivist learning, social
constructivism, cognitivism, connectivism and Humanism (Ikeda, 2014). In this assignment,
discussion about the most appropriate teaching and learning theories will be done for teaching a
56-year-old patient regarding smoking cessation who is suffering from asthma.
Meryl is 56-year-old woman, who had and history of asthma and now smokes more than
eight cigarettes per day. She is financially stable hence having moderate socio economic status.
She belongs to an English speaking community and by profession she is a schoolteacher. These
details about Meryl determine that she is educated, financially stable and independent woman.
However, despite having history of asthma she smokes cigarettes every day. Hence, learning
education is an important aspect of nursing in this case as the theories of learning will help Meryl
to make understands that cigarette smoking is harmful for her health condition. The context of
teaching will be delegating more responsibilities on the patient so that she can take care of our
health. Secondly, using her knowledge about her health concerned and correct if she has any
misconceptions. Finally, making sure that she understands the primary aspect of this learning
education and support the healthcare process by implementing smoking suggestion (Ikeda,
2014).
In this case, behaviorism theory is the most appropriate theory that can be used to teach
Meryl and influence her to cease her smoking related habit. According to de Melo Ghisi et al.

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(2014) behaviorism is the learning theory in which the learner is passive and is meant to
responding the environmental stimuli. In this learning process, the patient will be influenced to
reshape her habits and for these purpose different rewards as well as punishments will be
provided to her so that she can motivate herself everyday to case her smoking habit. In the
context of Meryl, she is educated and knows about her health condition and asthma. However,
due to environmental and habit related stimuli she smokes every day, hampering her health
condition (Shoemaker et al., 2014). This condition can be influenced by her moderate socio
economic status, as it does not inhibit her from smoking cigarettes. Further, as she works as a
schoolteacher there are possibilities that her work related stress also influences her to smoke
cigarettes. Therefore, behaviorism related nursing theory would be used, as it will start with
observing the responses of Meryl to the environmental and surrounding stimuli and then will
facilitate the process to determine the intended change (Schwartz, 2012). This is also important
in this context as smoking is a behavior and hence, using behaviorism theory the habit will be
influenced to be changed by enforcing some other habits in the personality of Meryl. Therefore,
the three step of behaviorism theory applied to Meryl will be observation, imitation and
reinforcement so that in the place of deleterious habits, she develops healthy and healthy habits
by making changes in her behavior (de Melo Ghisi et al., 2014).
To understand the effect of behaviorism theory in this context of Meryl and her smoking
cessation related condition, several recent literatures and their results should be mentioned in this
section. In a study by Aliakbari et al. (2015), the purpose of the researchers was to understand
the most effective learning strategies that are used by different nursing professionals around the
world and for that purpose, they conducted systematic review. It was found that behaviorism
theory was the dominant psychological approach for the observation and change implementation

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by the health professionals. Further, in another study by Tamim and Grant (2017), researchers
were keen to understand the most used learning theory in mHealth and eHealth section of
healthcare. Twelve nursing professions were interviewed in this qualitative study and it was
found that they were not using a specific theory but used to connect theories such as
behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructive theory to determine the effectiveness of the process
and positive patient outcome. Similar study was conducted to provide culturally tailored diabetes
education to Chinese patients and in this research by Choi et al. (2017), the researchers
implemented a case study related process, in which multiple ethnographic data collection
methods including participant observations and qualitative interviews were included. It was
found that healthcare professions primarily provided information and used knowledge
reinforcement to facilitate behavioral change by implementing the learning theory of
behaviorism. Hence, the behaviorism theory can be an appropriate learning theory for smoking
cessation and reinforcement of healthy habits in Meryl’s personality (Stoeckel, 2017).
The top three learning outcomes that the healthcare professional can expect to achieve
after the patient education related to smoking cessation will be related to reinforcement of
healthy habits in patient’s behavior. The first learning outcome will be Meryl will understand the
smoking related concern that is harming her weak lungs (due to her asthmatic condition). For the
purpose, different research data will be provided to her in lucid and easy form so that after
reading or going through them she can understand the deleterious effect of her habit. The second
outcome will be her self-motivation and drive that will influence her to stop smoking habit. This
will further influenced by the rewards and punishments provided by the healthcare expert on
frequent intervals so that positive health outc0omes can be achieved. Thirdly, the reinforcement

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of the positive health habit will be irreversible and she will never smoke after the learning
session due to stress or other environmental or social stimuli.
While concluding it should be mentioned that patient is an important stakeholder of the
healthcare process and hence, it is the primary duty of healthcare professionals to implement
different learning strategies and theories to observe, and implement or reinforce newer and
positive healthy habits so determine health improvement for the patient. In this section, smoking
cessation related habit of Meryl was challenged and using the behaviorism theory the smoking
habit was proposed to change. Further three health outcomes were also discussed.

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References
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http://doi.org/10.4103/2277-9531.151867
Choi, T. S., Walker, K. Z., & Palermo, C. (2017). Culturally tailored diabetes education for
Chinese patients: A qualitative case study. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, Vol. 28,
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de Boer, D., Delnoij, D., & Rademakers, J. (2013). The importance of patient-centered care for
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2011.10.002
de Melo Ghisi, G. L., Abdallah, F., Grace, S. L., Thomas, S., & Oh, P. (2014). A systematic
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Schwartz, G. (2012). Consciousness and Self-regulation: Advances in Research and
Theory (Vol. 2). Springer Science & Business Media.

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Shoemaker, S. J., Wolf, M. S., & Brach, C. (2014). Development of the Patient Education
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