Diabetes Awareness

Diabetes Awareness

Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support classes can help change lives!

November is National Diabetes Month, a month focused on organizations teaming up all over the country to bring attention to diabetes. It's easy to see the need for a diabetes awareness month when according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), one in five people in the United States who has diabetes doesn't even know that they have it. That's 7.3 million people out of 34.2 million who aren't aware they are living with this disease and the health risks that come with it.

Each year, there is a different focus on diabetes awareness. This year's focus is on prediabetes and preventing diabetes. Prediabetes is a serious health condition where your blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough yet to be diagnosed as type 2 diabetes. According to the CDC, more than 1 in 3 U.S. adults have prediabetes, that's 88 million people, and the majority of people don't even know they have it!

Diabetes puts people at risk for nerve damage, cardiovascular disease, foot and limb injuries, vision problems, and other complications that arise from having uncontrolled blood sugar, as the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus cautions. Not to mention, diabetes raises a person’s risk of developing serious COVID-19, per the CDC. Consequently, understanding diabetes and how to manage it is more important than ever.

Grace Health is part of a diabetes learning collaborative through UK Healthcare, Kentucky Public Health, and KHIE. The collaboration started in June 2021 and runs through June 2022. The collaborative focuses on diabetes education and referring patients to our local health departments for DSMES (Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support) classes. A patient of Alice Ward, a family nurse practitioner at our Bell County Clinic, has had great success with her classes. Alice's patient's A1C pre-DSMES was 9.9 post-DSMES 9.1. She lost a total of 35 pounds, by walking 20 minutes a day - 7 days a week, and successfully met a goal of eating 3 balanced meals a day while limiting her food intake after 7 pm. She stated, "the sessions helped me so much in learning to make good choices."

We encourage all Grace Health providers to utilize the resource of referring patients to DSMES classes.