Endocrine Abstracts

Background and purpose: The rising incidence of diabetes mellitus in Albania intensifies the need for effective health education for DM risk reduction among pharmacists, nurses and other health care practitioners. As a result, continuing diabetes education is pivotal in improving the performance of these professionals and thus providing better health care services.

Objective: Our goal was to develop an e-learning course on the management of Diabetes mellitus for community pharmacists, primary care nurses and other primary care healthcare professionals and assessing its efficacy, effectiveness, and user satisfaction.

Methodology: This was a self-paced distance learning course on Diabetes Management for pharmacists and other healthcare professionals was developed and evaluated for its efficacy, effectiveness, and satisfaction. We performed a stratified randomized controlled trial with these healthcare professionals which have at least 1 year working experience, using pre- and post-knowledge tests, and satisfaction questionnaires. We wanted to identify the possible improvement in test results (percentage of correct answers), using intention-to-treat and per-protocol analysis.

Results: A total of 72 participants were assigned to the intervention (22 nurses, 42 pharmacists, 8 GPs) with 65 participants in the control group (20 nurses +39 pharmacists, 6 GPs). The intervention was completed by 60 participants (17 nurses+39 pharmacists +4 GPs), with 4 (2 nurses+2 pharmacists) discontinued interventions, and 8 (3 nurses+3 pharmacists +2 GPs) lost to follow-up. Substantial differences were found between intervention and control: 21 versus 4 percentage points (pp) in the primary outcome results.

Discussion and conclusions: This e-learning course is effective, especially for community pharmacists and primary care nurses, which highlights the need for continuing education in Diabetes Management.

Keywords: diabetes mellitus, continuing education, distance learning, evaluation studies, community pharmacists, primary care