Online structured education with email facilitation for people with type 2 diabetes: feasibility trial
- 1 October 2015 to 30 September 2016
- Project No: 280
- Funding round: FR 9
- e-Health
We have developed an online structured education with email facilitation for people recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The goal of the programme is to help people understand diabetes: what causes it, how it is likely to affect them, how it is treated, and how to help themselves achieve physical and emotional wellbeing. It is NHS policy that everyone diagnosed with type 2 diabetes is offered structured education, but at the moment, take-up is low, with fewer than 10% of eligible patients attending. One reason may be that all the current programmes are group-based – and many people do not want to attend a group, either because they cannot afford the time, or because they do not like groups. We think that offering people a choice of structured education programmes will help improve uptake, but first we need to know whether the new, online programme with email facilitation works, and how it can be improved.
To find out whether it works, we need to undertake a pilot study to determine its acceptability to practices and patients and its effectiveness (how well the programme works). In order to do this, we will undertake a small study, in up to three general practices. We will see how many people we can recruit, what are the best methods of recruitment, how many people complete the programme and questionnaires, and whether there are any changes in participants’ knowledge about diabetes, self-efficacy (self-confidence) in managing their health, and well-being as a result of the education received. We will use the results to improve the programme and the methods for testing it.