Developing quality structured education in diabetes
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Research News 

Do lay people make good Educators? Our Lay Educator study aims to find out!

It’s been a very exciting time in our Lay Educator research study during the last 12 months, and we’ve made great progress from the early beginnings in 2008.

Because this study is strongly focused on developing and testing training and support, we made a decision to increase the time allocated to this in the early stages of the study.

By June 2009, we had arranged training for Lay Educators and their healthcare professional Educator partners, and given everyone a chance to try out their new skills. We received some really useful feedback from all the participants and as a result, created more opportunities for Lay Educators to access practice sessions and increase their diabetes knowledge. The healthcare professional Educators were not left out! We supported them to improve their mentorship skills and our trainers worked with each Educator team to get them ready for the trial phase of the study.   

In the meantime the research team pulled out all the stops behind the scenes to have everything ready for the main trial. They organised, the submission to the ethics committee, dealt with the fearsome paperwork for local governance approval, set about recruiting GP practices to take part. 

Sadly, during this time, it became necessary for two of our sites to withdraw from the study. We were sorry to lose them, but these things happen in research, and we still count ourselves lucky to have gained a great deal of learning from their contributions.

Now our trial is well underway, with the first patient courses being delivered in December 2009. We have now recruited 48 patients to the study, and hope to increase this over the next 6 months.   So far, we have presented some of our early findings at the Diabetes UK Annual Professional Conference in 2009, and at the International Diabetes Federation Conference in Montreal, also in 2009.   If this study interests you, look out for further news via this website.