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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Journal of Social Health and Diabetes 2021; 9(01): e15-e18
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1731095
Original Article

Why and How Stories Matter in Treating Children with T1DM—Best Practice from CDiC

Sanjay Kalra
1   Department of Endocrinology, Bharti Research Institute of Diabetes & Endocrinology (BRIDE), Karnal, Haryana, India
,
Rishi Shukla
2   Department of Diabetes Education, Market Access & Public Affairs, Regency Hospital Ltd., Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
,
Shuchy Chugh
3   Department of Diabetes Education, CDiC India, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
,
P. Dinakaran
4   Department of Market Access & Public Affairs, CDiC India, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
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Abstract

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is a lifelong disorder that mostly happens any time during childhood. It needs constant care and attention. Self-management becomes very essential as there are multiple factors that influence management of blood glucose levels and good outcomes. Diabetes education[1] is essential for this and it involves the process of providing the person with the knowledge and skills needed to perform diabetes self-care, manage crises, and to make lifestyle changes to successfully manage their life. It begins with teaching of survival skills and continues with higher learning to fit diabetes into lives of people with diabetes rather than changing the lives to manage diabetes. Although parents are responsible for this initially, children must be part of this learning and journey as they are the one who must deal with diabetes in their life.

Although knowledge transfer from scientific (truth and fact based) and narrative story (experience and meaning based) is fundamentally different but narrative or stories are better absorbed and retained. Storytelling and experience sharing are rapidly developing fields in medical education, but its potential has yet to be realized in medical education. The Changing Diabetes in Children program focused at reaching out to the economically underprivileged children with T1DM has implemented the use of stories to help the T1DM child learn to take insulin injections and understand the basic do’s and don’t’s for proper diabetes management and motivate them to become self-reliant and independent adults in long run.

Keywords

type 1 diabetes mellitus - diabetes education stories - motivation - good habits


Publication History

Article published online:
31 December 2021

© 2021. Novo Nordisk Education Foundation. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial-License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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