Once a hospital-wide patient education program is in place, professionals are faced with prioritizing patient teaching needs and matching them with available monies and personnel. The Patient Teaching Program at the Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center includes a hospital-wide Director of Patient Education, an Interdisciplinary Patient Education Committee, and so far, a Nursing Advisory Board. Eventually, Advisory Boards are projected for all of the major disciplines. Nursing's progress in patient education is understandable: nurses comprise over 50 percent of health care professionals in most settings. Also, they are with patients 24 hours a day. They are in an ideal position to anticipate patient teaching needs and readiness to learn as well as to coordinate and reinforce teaching done by other disciplines. Since nurses are always with patients, they can most readily spot learning impediments (i.e., deficits in hearing, speech, sight and mental capacity), and develop strategies for coping with them.The teaching-learning process is interactive: it depends on feedback from both the teacher and the learner for optimal results to occur. Some selected populations may be able to benefit from self-care teaching packets, particularly if there is an evaluation component and the learner is literate enough to use the tool and benefit from the evaluation. However, many patients in crisis, even though literate and familiar with self-learning packets, may not be able to benefit from this type of learning. The professional always has to use his own discretion concerning the relevance of a particular teaching aid for a particular patient. The human elements of caring, empathy and encouragement are important aspects of the teaching-learning process, and may help a patient to learn more than all the available information and teaching aids.