Grant: Operating Grant: Knowledge to Action

Diabetes care is complicated for people with diabetes as well as for health care providers: they have to watch their diet, exercise, take medications, checking blood sugars and blood pressure, get tests and see multiple doctors. On top of that, many with diabetes have other health problems, such as high blood pressure or arthritis, that make care even more complicated. Guidelines for improving the care of people with diabetes try to help by summarizing the best practices for care, but because diabetes care is so complicated, it is hard for them to be put into practice. One solution to this is a tool that can help people with diabetes set health care goals that are important to them, and participate actively in decisions about their own health care, together with health care providers. This tool would have an information booklet for patients with facts that can help them make a decision, a worksheet to help spell out what their goals are and how they want to get there, and a cheat-sheet for health care providers that gives them tips on how to do this. The purpose of this project is to find out if a tool like this would be helpful, how we could make it more helpful and usable, and what the best way would be to make sure that people use it.