Team Peak Performers: Diabetes Education Nurses

The Diabetes Nurse Team has worked very hard to continue to provide excellent care to our very large population of patients diagnosed with diabetes, Type 1 or Type 2. Throughout the pandemic they have overcome several challenges as a team, and there were no lapses in the quality of the care and education they provided to our patients and families. Diabetes did not stop, or even slow down, for Covid-19! In fact, the number of newly diagnosed patients in the hospital and clinic have increased over the last 2 years! When the inpatient units were rearranged to house patients positive for COVID the team had to act quickly to find a way to provide the same quality education to patients coming in with COVID and a new diabetes diagnosis! After working with the Command Center and our I.T. Department they were able to jump in and continue providing new diagnosis education to patients & families over Zoom, and continue to make sure those families understood the education as well as the families they educate face to face. The team also worked to develop a program to provide the group education that our newly diagnosed families receive in the Zoom setting. Patients with concerns about travel, visitor restrictions, or exposures to illnesses did not have to leave the house to attempt to obtain their important education. No patients have had to go without receiving quality education because of our RN Diabetes Education Team!

The Diabetes Education Team in consistently monitoring the quality of the education they provide in the hospital and in the clinic. They take patient feedback seriously and try to do everything they can to make sure potential problems are identified and come up with possible solutions. They team has meetings scheduled on a weekly basis to review the program and identify potential updates to the program that can make it better. The binder that is given to patients was recently updated to make the most important information more clear and to include important developmental concerns. The team is also working with our multidisciplinary team to improve the new diagnosis education we provide to our growing group of children diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. They are creating a separate binder specific to that population while taking into consideration the key differences in caring for a child with Type 2 diabetes, as opposed to Type 1 diabetes. A diagnosis of diabetes is not a "one size fits all" diagnosis, and the team has taken this into consideration when working with their patients and families so that no matter the type of diabetes the patient is diagnosed with, they will all receive the same quality of care.