Abstract

THE DEVELOPMENT AND ASSESSMENT OF A DIABETES PATIENT EDUCATION ELECTIVE AT THE DOCTOR OF PHARMACY PROGRAM

Aladin Siddig*, Victor Obi, Yvonne Ngong, Stephen Cook, Lindsay Acree, Ayman Shatnawi and Dean Reardon

ABSTRACT

This innovative course utilizes, in part, the Diabetes Empowerment Education Program (DEEP) protocol to enable pharmacy students to teach and to develop the requisite skills needed to help patients better understand and manage their diabetes. Diabetes Education and the Patient is a three-credit hour elective course that is open to first year PharmD students. The program is structured into eight modules such as Understanding Risk Factors for Diabetes. In addition to mastering the modules, students are required to attend two health care events, where they will utilize their newly acquired skills and knowledge to provide patient screenings and education on diabetes, and their risk factors. Course assessment will utilize student evaluations, rubrics for both oral and written assignments, reflection grading and informal verbal feedback. The students were given a pretest before the course began, which was designed by DEEP. The average score on the pretest was a 67.5% with a high score of 95% and a low of 50%. Questions from the pre/posttest are broken down into nine major categories along with number of questions within each category. There was no significant changes in result among different years. Student’s feedback was used to improve this course. This course provides students with a basic ability to counsel patients on diabetes during their early experiential education rotations, rather than waiting for the topic to be formally taught in the third year pharmacotherapeutics course. Students will gain an understanding of practical patient diabetes education, making this an indispensable tool and professional reference for student pharmacists.

Keywords: Diabetes, hypoglycemic, Pharmacotherapeutics, self-monitoring, Risk-factors, self-monitoring.