Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Diabetes mellitus is a major public health problem affecting all ages worldwide. In Tunisia, 18% of the population has diabetes mellitus. In fact, it is one of the first ten causes of death in our country.Therefore, self-management education for diabetic patients play an important role in reducing diabetes complications and mortality rate. The education is conducted not only by doctors, but also by nurses.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to determine the nurses’ knowledge in diabetes self-management education (DSME)

Methods: We are presenting a descriptive study including 32 nurses, 17 nurses from the endocrinology department of Hédi Chaker hospital, Sfax, Tunisia, and 15 nurses from the healthcare dispensary Mohamed Ali Sfax Tunisia.

Results: The majority of nurses: 62,50% were young, aged between 25 and 40 years old, 78% of them were female and 78,5% were married. We discovered that only 63% of the nurses were involved in nurse-led DSME and did actually have specific training in DSME. The nurses believed that the purpose of DSME is essentially to prevent complications (36%), to lead as normal a life as possible (30%), to obtain a balanced blood sugar (18%) and to improve the patient’s life (16%).Only 6,25%of the nurses had real good knowledge in DSME vs 75% and 18,75% having average and poor knowledge respectively.The majority of the female nurses (56,25%) had average knowledge in DSME vs 18,75% in the male group, and only 6,25% of the female nurses knew how to properly educate the diabetes patients vs 0% in the male nurses.Total absence of DSME knowledge was mostly described in the youngest group of nurses (25-40 years old) with an average of 18,75% vs 0% in older nurses (> 40 years old).We noted that nurses having more than 10 years work experience were more efficient in educating the patients than those with less work experience.Finally, we asked the nurses to provide solutions on how to get more information about DSME, 50% of them proposed attending seminars, 44% proposed organizing ongoing training sessions and 6% didn’t comment.

Conclusion: In recent years, great emphasis has been placed on the role of non-pharmacological self-management in the care of patients with diabetes. Studies have reported that nurses, compared to other healthcare professionals, are more likely to promote preventive healthcare seeking behaviors.