Special Edition: Type 2 Diabetes, Issue #1

Recently, a doctor who I used to do diabetes classes for called me. We had stopped the classes because of a lack of funding and he wanted to start them again. Part of his reason was to help his patients but he also knew that he was now being graded on how well he controlled his patients’ A1c and provided prevention services.

As in most practices he knew that even if we did two classes for his patients a month he would only get to about 30% of his diabetes patients. In the past his MA gave each patient a folder with 20-30 sheets of information but he found out that most patients were overwhelmed with all the information and did not read any of it.

His patients, like most of yours, found it very hard to make changes in their food choices especially when it came to portion control and not eating the "wrong things."

While reviewing the materials he had been handing out he commented, "Why do we think patients would do the right thing because we tell them; after all, if they did, they would not have diabetes in the first place."

He and I began to work on developing a one page sheet that explained diabetes, food choices, monitoring, physical activity and medications.

We have been using this sheet in his office and I have shared it with other clinicians with a good response so this month we thought we would make it available to you.