Quality assurance of individual diabetes patient education

Individual patient education is the most common means of communicating diabetes information and teaching self-care skills. Despite a considerable amount of literature regarding the outcome of group patient education, there is limited reference to the outcome of individual diabetes patient education or to quality assurance of the health messages delivered during this type of education. This study was designed to develop standardized educational messages for individual patient education delivered by diabetes nurse educators, test the immediate impact of these educational messages on patient knowledge, and identify any differences between diabetes nurse educators in their ability to influence patient knowledge. Overall, subjects demonstrated a significant improvement in knowledge immediately following an individual education session. The topic with the least improvement was diet. Significant differences in the patients' posteducation knowledge scores were observed between the three nurse educators in this study. No apparent patient factors accounted for this difference.