Taking education to the masses

I’d had my eye on the Education session on Day 1 with equal excitement and trepidation.  The education campaign is one I feel personally connected to.  I felt like the DAFNE course I did has made a huge difference to how I manage my own diabetes, and so hearing a number of professional views on the subject was something I was looking forward to.

Equally, I’d been asked to give a short view of my experiences of education to the assembled professionals, so I was a little nervous about how that was going to go.

If you’ve not had a look at the Diabetes UK Taking Control campaign yet, I’d urge you to start there.  The campaign launched towards the end of last year, and is aimed at making sure everyone is given the chance to learn about their diabetes.  I think we’re at a point now where the evidence for education is no longer in question, we’re now looking at how best to get that education out to as many people.

The session was split down into five talks:

•           Taking Control campaign – Bridget Turner
•           Making the case for diabetes education – Charles Gostling, Helen Hopkinson, Alison White
•           Getting people there – Vivien Coates, Anne Scott
•           Adding options to the education menu – Sarah Newall, Rebecca Owen, Kingshuk Pal
•           Addressing specific local barriers – Tahseen Chowdhury, Seonaid Morrison

Bridget set the scene, explaining why Diabetes UK are championing education and how using an adapted House of Care can be used as a model to deliver education to more people.

Bridget Turner (Director of Policy and Care Improvement at Diabetes UK),
discussing the adapted House of Care model for education

I gave my own (short) view on my personal experience of DAFNE, and why I think education is important.  I won’t dwell on my own personal views too much here, but I generally believe that education helps people become more active in their own healthcare and that in turn helps them achieve better outcomes.  I’ll save that for a separate post outside of the conference.

The stage was set for the other examples from the rest of the speakers.  Charles Gostling started off talking about how they deliver education to people in South London.  He made a great reference to the latest National Diabetes Audit (NDA) data, saying that without clear data, we don’t know where we do things well.  I think that’s a point that can’t be stressed enough.  Without getting side-tracked into a debate on NDA submissions, I think it’s really important to understand your starting position and data is the way you do that.

We know diabetes education referrals are generally low, the take up rates even lower.  Two key messages Charles got across were simple (but important ones).  Firstly, find out why people don’t take up the offer of education.  Secondly, share local success stories.  If someone is doing something well, make sure it’s publicised across your local area so others can learn from it.

Helen Hopkinson then moved onto how the education offering was redesigned, talking through the journey they went on to get to DAFNE (‘because it’s evidence based and we know it works’).  She made a great point that redesigning your education offering can be cost free but when looking at how to do that, you need to engage all your stakeholders.

Why choose DAFNE?

That second aspect sounds so fundamental, that it almost beggars belief that you’d have to say it at all.  It’s a pretty short-sighted approach to try and design something one group of people, that’s paid for by another, provided by a third and ‘marketed’ by a fourth without including them all in the process.  You wouldn’t expect it for iPhones, so why should diabetes education be any different?  It was eye opening in its simplicity.

“Getting People There” looked at reasons why people with diabetes choose not to attend courses (“I learned from other sources”, “more important things to do”, “don’t see the point”).  Some of these struck a chord with me.  I started out with the view that I didn’t need education, but now I’m a big advocate for it.  I think we need to do more to sell the benefits of people who could be persuaded to go if they knew what they’d get from it.  Others need a different model of support – as with everything related to diabetes, one size doesn’t fit all.

As we moved to the discussion on “Adding options to the education menu”, we saw some interesting and innovative ways Lambeth were engaging with different groups within their area.  As with the other parts of the session, there’s some blindingly obvious bits in there too.  If you’ve got an education offering, tell people about it.  Spread the word as much as you can, use community centres, library groups, church meetings – anyone you can – to widen the circle of people who know you have something for them.

One of the most interesting things that came up was the concept of taster sessions.  These are short (90 mins) sessions that act as an introduction to the larger scale education courses on offer.  They’re typically targeted at groups or populations that are historically harder to reach (the example they gave was the Sri Lankan community in Lambeth), or those where Did Not Attend (DNA) rates are higher.   With all the taster sessions, people were ‘followed’ to see how many attended a full course later.  That stood at about 10% for the first year, but it’s hoped to be higher for 2016.

The last bit I’d like to talk about was HeLP Diabetes – an online learning option for people with Type 2 diabetes.  I think it’s important to cover as a lot of people want more online support and if we return to this ground breaking idea of providing what people want, this ticks the boxes.

Around 50% of visitors to the HeLP Diabetes site come outside ‘regular’ working hours, when it’d obviously harder to provide traditional education like DESMOND.  Interestingly, despite some of the upsides to the online delivery (24/7 access, anonymity etc), it still faced some of the more traditional barriers, such as spreading the word about its availability.

I’m a huge advocate of education because I’ve got a deeply personal experience about how it transformed my ability to be in control of my diabetes.  I think the case for things like DAFNE is huge (given its evidence base), and I think that by selling the benefits of the education, we can convince those who have the time, but no inclination, to attend a course and hopefully go on a similar journey to the one I went one.

That said, it’s naïve to think there’s only one way to persist, and if we want to give the benefits of education to as many people as possible, we need to consider how best we offer that education to meet the needs of the many.  “Education is about interaction with others, whether that’s other people with diabetes, healthcare professionals, of your friends and family” – I think many of us who’ve been on a course, or have used social media to help us with our diabetes would agree with that.

The last word should go to Seonaid Morrison from Argyll & Bute on the West Coast of Scotland.  She gave an incredible talk (without slides after a technical problem), on how she crosses a huge geographical area to try and bring education to as many people as possible…

“When you provide education to people, you see the change in them. That's what gets me up and out of bed in a morning”.