Supervising and Mentoring Health Educators: Tips for Improving Services

What makes your health education staff so much better than a walking, talking brochure? It’s their education and counseling skills - their ability to go beyond the facts and help clients use health information in a way that makes sense in their own lives.

The foundation for these skills can be learned in a classroom or a workshop, but health education skills have to be nurtured over time in the real world. Practicing skills in an environment that supports their development and evolution is essential to becoming effective health educators and counselors.

Supervisors can make a difference.

That’s where supervisors can make a positive impact on their staff and the quality of services to clients. Often times, staff members are sent to training workshops to learn new skills, but then do not receive on-going support to effectively use and develop those skills in the clinic. Supervisors of health education staff are in a unique position to proactively mentor health educators, helping their staff to better meet the needs of clients.

One way to mentor staff is to create a positive climate for learning and support. An essential part of building skills is the knowledge that skills need to be developed. Create an environment in your clinic that not only supports learning, but encourages it. There are a number of ways that supervisors can create a learning environment.

Spread the word!

Communicate with staff that your organization takes their professional development seriously.

• Put up signs that remind staff of good health education practices.
• Ask them to think about what they’ve learned today about providing better care.

Use staff meetings as mini-workshops.

Spend five or ten minutes at each staff meeting talking with staff about essential skills.

• Focus on one skill, and include a scenario.
• Have staff brainstorm best ways of addressing interesting cases that have come up in clinic.
• Have staff practice new skills, or refresh old ones, during staff meetings. This can be done with role plays or observing role plays.

Share educational resources.

• Post articles (like the article you are reading) in the break room.
• Leave periodicals with new research where employees can read it.
• Use a post-it on the interesting pages or highlighters in the table of contents to mark the most interesting articles.
• Ask employees what they thought of the article.
• Review the articles in staff meetings.
• Leave brochures on new health topics in common spaces.
• Ask employees what they like about each brochure and how they might use each with clients.

Give your employees feedback about their work.

Skill development should be an essential part of progress reviews and employee files.

• Provide employees with opportunities to enhance their skills and document their efforts.
• Plan ways to enhance their skills for the coming year at each review.

Let your educators evaluate themselves.

There are creative and helpful ways they can review their own work.

• Give your staff opportunities to role play health education sessions.
• Video or audio tape the sessions.
• Let them review their own sessions to determine what they did well and how they could improve.
• Encourage staff to continually evaluate the sessions they have with real clients and to talk to other staff about how to better meet their clients’ needs.

Train peers and supervisors how to evaluate.

Train supervisors (including you) and health educators on how to evaluate a health education session and on how to give constructive feedback.

• Have co-workers set up peer evaluation sessions where they can analyze each other’s health education techniques.
• Have supervisors sit in on actual health education sessions, evaluate the health educator, and provide constructive feedback.

Keep in mind that evaluations, whether they are conducted by one’s self, a peer or a supervisor, can be pro-active and a normal course of one’s employment. If evaluations are conducted only when there is a problem or a suspected problem with an employee’s skills, then they can be perceived by staff as punitive and not the positive and productive exercises they are meant to be.

By being positive and supportive, your health education staff can develop the skills they need to truly help their clients live a healthier life.