Editor`s Opinion: The Educated Healthcare Provider

    Learn in order to teach and to practice. — The Talmud (A.D. 1st – 6th century)

    What is an educated person? Is it the high school student who just received his diploma? All doctoral degree recipients? The thousands who just returned from attending the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care — their minds and suitcases filled with new knowledge and information? Are the men and women I see walking across the stage to receive their hard-earned, long-awaited pin signifying that they successfully completed their BSN or MSN program “educated persons”? Does the completion of a formal education program guarantee that a person is educated or, as contemplated by Fenstermacher and Soltis,¹ should the “Educated Person” label be reserved for people who have met different, less-formal, standards? After all, there are many people with diplomas who do not seem very educated as well as folks lacking formal education who would easily be our phone-a-friends should we be in need of particular information. Plus, with the information explosion comes the sense that the more we know, the more there is to learn. Perhaps the educated person is the one with the fewest inadequacies in a professed area of expertise. Or maybe the educated person simply projects an aura of intelligence — that educated, like politics, is a matter of perception.

    Clearly, there is no easy answer to the seemingly no-nonsense question, “What is an educated person?” particularly in healthcare. Successfully caring for the body human demands the perfect blend of book smarts and intuitive, practical abilities that cannot be osmotically absorbed by reading and notetaking. Perhaps an educated person is one who understands that education is a journey with no final destination: there is always something new to know and new ways to come to know it. Education in healthcare will continue to require ongoing clinical instruction and practice. There can be no resting on one’s laurels. Healthcare and education are dynamic — we will never know it all.

    Without a doubt, knowledge acquisition (the curriculum kind, the kind for which they bestow diplomas) is crucial. Understanding the fundamentals — knowledge, comprehension, synthesis, evaluation, application, and analysis — is critical to the assimilation of additional layers of information that, for clinicians, will enhance provision of care. Although earning a piece of paper indicating the completion of a series of courses does not guarantee “educated person status,” it is a good first step. Acquired knowledge may not translate into comprehension, critical evaluation, or optimal practice — but it does lay the foundation for “educated person” status. As the Chinese saying reminds us, “Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.” Therefore, we hereby congratulate all new graduates and all knowledge seekers. We are pleased to have you join us on our journey to “educated person” status in healthcare.

1.    Fenstermacher GD, Soltis JF. Approaches to Teaching, 3rd ed. New York, NY: Teachers College Press;1998.