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 courses 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.
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.
