I did the DESMOND course before Christmas, about six months after being diagnosed (it was the first date they were able to offer me). By that time I'd done a lot of research online, with the result that I didn't learn anything much from the course that I didn't already know. If I had been ignorant about T2, I dare say that I would have learned some useful stuff about the condition, but less about how to manage it. The one session that I did find useful, because I hadn't then been seen by a podiatrist, was the session about feet and footcare.
The session on diet was the usual Eat Well Plate stuff. We could argue for ever about whether it is good advice or bad to tell people to eat starchy carbs with every meal when they're diabetic but they did, at least, explain that carbs turn to glucose and that you need to exercise moderation in all things if you want to keep your levels under control. I said on here at the time that I thought it might be better to succeed in persuading people to modify their diet a bit rather than to completely fail to persuade them to make quite significant changes, but I thought they rather over-egged the "You don't have to make massive changes to your diet, just minor adjustments"
schtick. When I asked if it was really sensible advice to eat carbohydrates with every meal, the Dietician went off on a bit of a tangent and started talking about how a high-protein diet might be bad if you had kidney damage. No doubt true, and of greater relevance to Diabetics than to some others because of the higher risk of kidney damage, but she never really answered my question.
So, I wouldn't describe it as useless but it was of limited value to me and, as already mentioned
ad nauseam, the advice about diet is probably best described as debateable. On a practical, administrative note, apparently they always over book the courses because there is a high no-show rate. Inevitably, everyone turned up for the course I was on, with the result that the room allocated for the course was far too small and there wasn't really time for any discussions or meaningful response to questions (as above
).