Pacific Diabetes Education Program: Diabetes education materials created BY Pacific Islanders, FOR Pacific Islanders

Background: Native Hawaiians (NH) and Pacific Islanders (PI) have a high diabetes burden, but few culturally targeted education materials exist.

Method: The Pacific Diabetes Education Program (PDEP) uses a community participatory model, involving 300+ community members to date, to develop culturally targeted diabetes education materials. PDEP partners with NH and PI agencies that meet the following criteria: 1) they have membership in and/or access to their community; 2) they proactively support health promotion in their community; and 3) they commit 10-15 hours over 6 months to review, develop, and pretest educational materials.

Results: PDEP has developed over 20 tailored educational materials on diabetes prevention and control, featuring faces, activities, words and scenes from NH and PI communities. PDEP collaborated with partners (e.g., through community discussion groups and pretesting) to develop the format, messages, and cultural components of each product. Pretesting suggested good comprehension of messages and that tailored materials were more attractive and relevant than existing ones. Also, partnering with community-based agencies facilitated distribution of materials to community members.

Conclusion: This model may be used to develop health education materials for other minority communities. Keys to successful partnerships include: responding to community-identified needs; providing resources and compensation to partners; allowing time to develop trust and relationships; reporting to partners throughout the process; sharing results with partners first; acknowledging partner contributions; and using partnerships to facilitate distribution of materials. Though time-consuming, taking these steps help to ensure that educational materials are attractive, acceptable, readable, useful and ultimately disseminated to intended audiences.