Patients should participate in designing diabetes educational content.

Patients with diabetes are ultimately responsible for their disease management, but many patients with diabetes do not have the necessary knowledge or skill. Recently developed National Standards for diabetes care include patient education. A nonprobability, convenience sample of 50 patients and 50 staff nurses was selected to judge the relative importance (on a 1 to 6-point Likert-type scale) of 108 content items developed under the 15 areas designated for patient education in the National Standards. Questionnaire return rates were 88% for nurses and 82% for patients. Internal consistency for questionnaire subscales ranged from 0.81 to 0.97. Findings indicated a high degree of congruence between patient and nurse content rankings, r = 0.71 to 0.81 (excluding the Medication subscale). Seven of the 15 content areas were ranked almost equally. Areas ranked low in importance were general facts, psychosocial aspects and health care benefits. This study supports the notion that patients should be included when planning diabetes patient education activities.