For National Diabetes Week this year (12-18 July) we’re encouraging you to grow your diabetes village. In this post, pharmacist and diabetes educator TARA SAVAGE explains the central role of a diabetes educator.
Diabetes educators are health professionals who have completed postgraduate training, mentoring and supervised practice in diabetes education.
A key part of a diabetes educator’s role is listening and taking on board the real-life challenges you face.
Your diabetes educator can communicate to other health professionals how these challenges impact your ability to self-manage your diabetes. They can form part of a multidisciplinary team as well as provide individualised person-centred care for you.
People from a broad range of specialties become diabetes educators, including nurses, midwives, pharmacist, physiotherapists, podiatrists, dietitians, exercise physiologists, optometrists and Aboriginal health practitioners.
You can see a diabetes educator from being told you have pre-diabetes onwards, both for general information and for specific advice if there has been a change in your diabetes management.
What can a diabetes educator help me with?
A diabetes educator can help you understand what is happening in your body when you have diabetes. They can also support you to build skills to live with diabetes such as:
- Healthy coping and identifying the impact of emotions on managing your diabetes.
- Healthy eating and how different foods affect glucose levels and overall health.
- Being active and building strategies to improve activity.
- Helping you understand how medications work for diabetes and provide support using insulin.
- Providing education on how monitoring your glucose levels can help you make decisions.
- Supporting you to understand the risk of diabetes complications and how to prevent them.
- Problem solving and supporting you to make a plan when situations change, such as during periods of illness.
How does a diabetes educator work with the rest of your team?
A diabetes educator can make recommendations such as medication changes, technology updates or eye or feet checks and will communicate with other health professionals to follow these recommendations through.
The Diabetes WA Helpline connects you with our diabetes educators, who include dietitians, midwives, nurses, pharmacists and exercise physiologists, to help you find the right support in one conversation.
The Helpline is available from 8:30am to 4:30pm from Monday to Friday to answer all your diabetes questions – call 1300 001 880.
