Familiar Faces. An Innovation In Diabetes Instruction: A Home-Grown DVD

Effective diabetic patient education is an ongoing objective for public health professionals, but an especially daunting challenge for those working in underserved populations. A partnership between an urban university school of nursing and a suburban primary-care clinic that serves close to 1,000 uninsured patients each month prompted an innovative approach to this issue. The clinic medical director identified the education of newly-diagnosed diabetic patients as an area that RN-to-BSN students could adopt as their public health clinical project. With their instructor, they originated the idea of creating an instructional DVD “starring” the clinic staff, using Bandura's Social Learning Theory as a guiding framework. The purpose of the DVD, which is to be reproduced and distributed to newly diagnosed patients, is two-fold: to educate patients about diabetes and demonstrate necessary disease-related self-management skills, and to combat the time constraints of busy clinic staff. The students wrote the script and plotted the storyboard; a local company was hired for filming and editing. It is hoped that by making familiar faces readily available at any time and as often as necessary, the DVDs will help patients manage their diabetes successfully over the long term, as evidenced by Hgb A1C levels and BMI data. It is also hoped that by removing the daily burden for educating these patients from clinic staff, the DVDs will free the physicians and nurses to treat more patients.