Diabetes Education
Diabetes education courses are available for free or privately
Diabetes education is an essential part of good blood sugar control, and avoiding long-term healthcare complications.
For each individual, there is a vast amount of condition-specific information necessary for successful diabetes management.
What type of diabetes education is available?
People with diabetes need to know what to do if something goes wrong, how to adjust their diet, exercise, lifestyle, medication or insulin.
A range of diabetes education programmes now exist in the UK, including DAFNE, DESMOND and X-PERT.
These diabetes courses are structured to empower diabetes patients to manage their own condition successfully.
Which diabetes course you enrol on depends on which type of diabetes you have, how recently you have been diagnosed, and your current management approach.
There are bespoke education courses for type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes, newly diagnosed diabetics, those using insulin pumps.
When people talk about diabetes education it generally refers to courses which help people with diabetes to learn to manage their condition.
Courses for type 1 and type 2 diabetes should be available in most parts of the country. For people with type 1 diabetes, the courses are designed to teach carbohydrate counting and insulin dosage skills. These courses are often intensive courses which may last for anywhere between half a day and a week.
For people with type 2 diabetes, courses are often based around understanding the condition and how to make lifestyle changes.
These courses tend to be run in sessions either over a day or a period of a few weeks. In some cases, diabetes courses will be run for people with both types of diabetes and will typically involve a number of sessions over a few weeks.
Ask your doctor, diabetes specialist or diabetes nurse to find out which courses may be available.
Some well known diabetes courses are:
- DAFNE courses - for people with type 1 diabetes
- DESMOND courses - for people with type 2 diabetes
- XPERT courses - for people with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes
The courses available are often similar to one of the above formats. At DAFNE style courses for people with type 1 diabetes you’ll learn:
- How to work out or closely estimate the carbohydrate quantity of foods
- Rules to help you set up your background insulin
- Rules to help you with your bolus (meal time) doses
- How to correct high and low blood sugar levels
- How best to manage sugar levels during exercise
- How to cope with periods of illness
At courses similar to DESMOND, you can learn:
- How the body responds to what we eat
- How blood glucose testing can help with understanding diabetes
- Making food choices
- Getting activity into the day
- Learning about medication
One of the benefits of the courses is the chance to meet others who are in a similar position and find out how they deal with diabetes. The feedback on diabetes courses is usually very good and the course providers are often keen to take patient feedback into account.
Insulin and non-insulin users educaton
For non-insulin users who have been recently diagnosed, the DESMOND course is highly recommended.
For type 1 diabetics, the DAFNE course is ideal, whilst for those with long-standing type 2 diabetes, the XPERT program is the most appropriate.
At this stage, very few general practices in the UK provide training for diabetes management.
The NHS recommends that diabetes patients are given the opportunity to get training, and most patients agree that they need help to manage their condition.
At this stage, only a small percentage of diabetics have attended a structured training programme.
Hopefully, by reading about the diabetes education and courses on Diabetes.co.uk, we can encourage more patient signups.
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