QUALITY ASSURANCE OF INDIVIDUAL DIABETES PATIENT EDUCATION

Individual patient education is the most common means of communicating diabetes information and teaching self-care skills. Despite a conside rable amount of literature regarding the outcome of group patient educ ation, there is limited reference to the outcome of individual diabete s patient education or to quality assurance of the health messages del ivered during this type of education. This study was designed to devel op standardized educational messages for individual patient education delivered by diabetes nurse educators, test the immediate impact of th ese educational messages on patient knowledge, and identify any differ ences between diabetes nurse educators in their ability to influence p atient knowledge. Overall, subjects demonstrated a significant improve ment in knowledge immediately following an individual education sessio n. The topic with the least improvement was diet Significant differenc es in the patients' posteducation knowledge scores were observed betwe en the three nurse educators in this study. No apparent patient factor s accounted for this difference.