Endocrine Abstracts

Background and Aims: Diabetes causes immeasurable personal suffering and costs to the society, though diabetes and its complications are largely preventable. There are proven, affordable preventions available, that can stop or delay diabetes/complication development. Political Declaration adopted by UNO stresses importance of educational measures to promote health education and literacy. IMAGE Project/Toolkit on Type 2 Diabetes Prevention in Europe outlines education as cornerstone of motivation creation. To provide high quality Therapeutic Patient Education (TPE) /motivation, education/training of educators (ETE) is essential. TPE is voluntarily practiced in Easter-European countries (EECs) for around 20yrs, though systematic ETE is rarely performed, besides, lack in education materials (EM) is experienced. Our aim was to train healthcare providers (HCPs) using Conversation Map Education Tools (CMapT) and provide them with EM.

Materials and Methods: Totally, 21 HCPs from 7 EECs participated in 2-day education course using CMapT. Training was carried out under the aegis of IDF-Global and IDF-Europe. CMapT are developed by HealthyInternational, Canada. HCPs were endocrinologists, pediatrician-endocrinologists, cardiologists/endocrinologists, psychologists, GPs, family medicine/nursing trainers. Agenda included 4 lectures and 7 Small Group Activities (SGA).

Results: Participants highly appreciated possibility to discuss problems and share views, they showed interest in CMapT and their implementation, ranging from HCPs education to school staffs and various civil services training/awareness-raising campaigns. Participants stated that CMapT make education flexible; interesting both for HCPs and people with diabetes; help to avoid professional burnout; create strong motivation; solve problems with EM.

Conclusion: IDF Global Diabetes Plan includes continuous self-management education and support in its core components. This training was important from standpoint of Political Declaration and interest paid by EEC Governments to TPE. Our challenge is to reduce human and financial costs of diabetes; TPE/ETE is an important tool in achieving this goal. Education of educators needs further development to make progress sustainable.

Declaration of interest: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research project.

Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sector.