A patient education system for a rural primary care centre

The paper describes a systems approach for integrating health education into a rural primary health care centre. Mechanisms chosen to accomplish this were: 1. health education protocols: patient-oriented teaching guides which identify the objective to be completed by the patient and specify the content to be taught by the educator as well as the methods and materials to be used for each objective of the patient's educational experience; 2. patient education diagnosis: process designed to make the education responsible to the environmental, economic and psychological factors influencing a person's health behaviour; 3. documentation instruments; simple guides to collect data to be used in evaluating education and health behaviour outcomes.