D. Kennedy, Community Diabetes Team

Education, Education, Education!

At the Inverclyde Community Diabetes Team action planning session, we felt it was important that one of our improvement actions focussed on supporting patients (below).

Our purpose was to improve the engagement and uptake from patients at group education sessions which have been developed for people newly diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. The purpose of the session is to support people newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes to equip them with the necessary knowledge and tools to enable them to self manage their condition well and ultimately prevent long term complications of Type 2 Diabetes, whilst maintaining a good Quality of Life.

Staff felt that the “iMatter process has focused the diabetes team to achieve our objective of improving diabetes patient education uptake.”

Throughout NHSGGC the uptake of this same group education session is comparable with Inverclyde, which is approximately 40%. So, following our discussion at the iMatter action planning session, we worked together to determine the following actions to support uptake: 

• Changed venue of education session

• Doubled number of people invited to session (14 patients currently)

• Included user-friendly patient education information with session invitation This explained in a little more detail what the session was about, what it entailed and the purpose of it. The aim of this was to give a warm, welcome to attending and dispel any beliefs that the session was formal, similar to school-like teaching.

• Telephone consultations in advance of sessions are now planned to provide information and explore any concerns regarding attendance.

• Inclusion of Podiatry input into session.

Implementing these actions has resulted in a 30-40% increase in uptake at the education sessions, with overall attendance now at 64%, which is a fantastic increase! 

Team members also noted the change, saying that “increased attendance at diabetes patient education group sessions has generated more discussions between patients and enhanced patient learning.”

We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate this attendance rate with the aim of maintaining these attendance levels (if not improving them) reviewing progress regularly, and, importantly, at our iMatter action planning progress review.