| Diabetes remains a significant health problem in the United States, and related complications are on the rise as evident by the growing prevalence due to care fragmentation and inadequate care coordination. This quantitative quality improvement project evaluated the effect of diabetes self-management education (DSME) reinforcement intervention as a primary care solution for prevention and control of diabetes and prediabetes in a small convenient care clinic in Southern California. The purpose of this project was to design and implement a diabetes self-management educational reinforcement program to enhance patients' knowledge on diabetes self-management. Diabetes knowledge improvement was measured by using a reliable and valid pretest and posttest DSMQ questionnaire. The pretest HbA1c mean was 6.51 and the post-test mean was 6.91. There was a paired differences mean of --0.40. Results indicates a significant rise in post-project HbA1c value among the control group ( p = < 0.05) as well as the DSMQ question 10 was shown significant improvement (p = 0.014). For the treatment group, the pretest HbA1c yielded a mean of 8.02 and the post-test mean of 7.51. There was a paired differences mean of 0.52 indicating a significant improvement in HbA1c value post-project (p = 0.00). The DSMQ items Q1, Q2, Q3, Q8, and Q9, were shown to have gotten significantly lower mean scores in the post-test while items Q5, Q7, Q11, Q13, Q15, and Q16 were shown to have significantly higher mean scores for the post-test. Structured telephonic reminders optimize patient experiences and diabetes patient care outcomes in primary care. |
