Assessing the integrated approach to diabetes patient education: a case study.

This article describes a nursing department quality assurance study involving a diabetes patient education program. The problem identified was whether staff nurses could teach diabetes education to their patients effectively rather than the diabetes educator doing all of the teaching. A two-phase pilot study was conducted. As a result, an improved audit tool was developed to gain more specific information to answering the question related to solving the problem. Implementation of the pilot, development of the audit tool, results and follow-up are described.