Building Competency in Diabetes Education THE ESSENTIALS

FOUNDATIONS OF DIABETES SELF-MANAGEMENT EDUCATION AND SUPPORT| 2-39

Figure 5: Model for health coaching (108)

Case mentoring and monitoring

Self management education and support

Diabetes health coaching

Behaviour modification

Psychosocial Support

Using this model as a framework, the effectiveness of each component can be evaluated. To summarize, “diabetes health coaching is a developing support process that is showing significant improvement over standard care in the efforts to facilitate self-care and behaviour change, leading to sustained clinical improvements in patients with diabetes“ (108,109,117 119).

Peer supporters Peer supporters have been used extensively in many aspects of diabetes self-management. They have been very effective in reinforcing learning, promoting the development of problem-solving skills, and in providing psychosocial support to improve quality of life (84, 86,111,114,112,115). Whether it is supporting type 1 patients in the university setting (121) or reaching out to rural communities, peer support groups have been shown to be effective in

Defining “Peer support”: “The provision of emotional, appraisal and informational assistance by a created social

network member who possesses experiential knowledge of a specific behaviour or stressor and similar characteristics as the target population, to address a health related issue of a potentially or actually stressed focal person” (122).