Diabetes education is a crucial part of a treatment plan. Diabetes education focuses on ways to incorporate disease management principles into your daily life and minimize your dependence on a health care provider.

Diabetes educators have identified three levels of diabetes education:

1. Basic disease management, including basic "survival skills"
2. Home management
3. Lifestyle improvement

Basic disease management includes the knowledge and skills that a person who is newly diagnosed with diabetes must master before leaving the hospital or health care provider's office. These skills include:

• Learning how to recognize and treat low blood sugar (hypoglycemia)
• Learning how to recognize and treat high blood sugar (hyperglycemia)
• Learning how to select the right foods and when to eat them (diabetes diet)
• Learning how to give yourself insulin or take oral hypoglycemic medications
• Learning how to test and record blood glucose (see blood glucose monitoring) and urine ketones
• Learning where to buy diabetes supplies and how to store them

Home management skills will help you better control your disease and may prevent complications. These skills include:

• Learning how to adjust insulin and food intake during exercise
• Learning how to handle sick days
• Learning diabetes foot care
• Learning to watch for long-term complications of diabetes and managing commonly associated conditions (such as high blood pressure)

Images

Endocrine glands

Diabetic blood circulation in foot

Food and insulin release

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Diabetes education Prevention

Review Date: 05/23/2010
Reviewed By: David C. Dugdale, III, MD, Professor of Medicine, Division of General Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M., Inc.

A.D.A.M., Inc. is accredited by URAC, also known as the American Accreditation HealthCare Commission (www.urac.org)