UC Irvine

Type 2 diabetes affects about every 1 in 10 Americans and is a global epidemic (CDC, 2020). Type 2 diabetes is a multifactorial disease that involves multiple aspects of the patient’s life need to be monitored, including diet, exercise, monitoring blood sugars and taking medications as prescribed. Most of this care is done solely by the patient without the direct supervision or help of the clinician which forces education to be an essential task to grasp by the patient. Underserved populations diagnosed with type 2 diabetes are at larger risk for life-altering consequences, including death, due to ineffective education that doesn’t allow them to fully understand how to manage this disease (Thurston et al., 2015).The purpose of this DNP Scholarly Project is to look at a different way of educating underserved patients with type 2 diabetes about their disease in order to increase knowledge and compliance with their diabetic regimens in order to create life-sustaining habits to improve their health for years to come. This different way of education comes in the form of participatory education. Participatory education allows the education to become patient-centered and empowers the patient to name their problems and transform themselves in the process of changing their behavior through games, skill building, role playing, focus groups and more hands-on activities. Incorporating participatory education allows a more even playing field for all participants to learn by eliminating the need for the patient to read or write. This DNP Scholarly Project’s goal was to evaluate an outpatient participatory educational program for underserved patients with type 2 diabetes and compare it to the literature standard. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the outpatient classes were postponed and therefore the project had to pivot. Instead, I evaluated an outpatient participatory educational class for underserved patients with hypertension and compared that to the literature. I also looked at my original Logic Model, which was rigorously and systematically formulated based on the literature review for the diabetes classes, and used it to determine if it was comprehensive and applicable to the new, hypertension intervention or if there were significant differences. Then the Logic Model was refined and results discussed for future interventions of the Logic Model.