Diabetes education is crucial to managing your diabetes and staying healthy. Conditions like diabetes require a top-quality understanding of your daily nutrition, exercise, medication and monitoring if you're to live a normal and healthy life. That's why our GP home doctor service in Marbella will help you manage your condition with the help of diabetes education.
Importance of Diabetes Education
Unlike other chronic diseases such as high cholesterol and blood pressure, medication alone isn't always enough to manage diabetes in its entirety. Diabetes is a complex disease with many other components that contribute to its severity including your nutritional management, activity levels, medication, managing your glucose levels and a degree of psychosocial adjustment.
Diabetes education with our GP home doctor service will help to make you more aware of your diabetes and how to treat and manage it. We'll also show you how you can incorporate the things you learn as part of your diabetes education into your everyday life by making various changes to your lifestyle.
Who to Involve in Your Diabetes Education
Your diabetes education should be carried out by yourself and a team of medical professionals, all of whom our GP home doctor service will refer you to. Ideally, your diabetes educational team should include:
- a doctor with a good understanding of diabetes
- a certified diabetes educator
- an exercise physiotherapist
- a nutritionist.
Best Practices for Diabetes Education
To get the best results from your diabetes education, it's a good idea to take part as both an individual and as part of a group. In group sessions, you might feel more comfortable as it will show you that other people have the same issues and concerns as you. These group sessions can be a great form of support when you're trying to manage your diabetes as it shows you that you're not alone. Group sessions also give you the opportunity to hear questions that you might not have thought of yourself, helping to widen your knowledge further. Our GP home doctor service will be able to point you in the right direction if you want to seek out group education.
It's also vital that you work with your team to create an individual plan to support the work you do in these group sessions.
Make sure that your diabetes self-management goals are individualised, measurable and achievable. Don't set your goals too high as you may become disheartened if you don't reach them. Making your goals measurable helps you track your progress and see how far you've come or more accurately see where you need to improve. For example, you might set yourself the goal of losing one or two pounds each week, while a longer-term goal could be to lose fifty pounds in six months.
Your diabetes education should be considered an ongoing process. Repeat your sessions and review your plan once every year or every two years at the least. Doing this will help keep you and our GP home doctor service up to date on your condition and progress.
Over time, the knowledge and understanding you'll gain from your diabetes education will give you the ability to control your diabetes and stop the condition from controlling you.
To chat with our GP home doctor service in Marbella about our diabetes education techniques, get in touch today.