Improving diabetes care is essential to preserve quality of life and longevity. The achievement of this goal depends on the diabetes education. Different health care centers have developed diabetes programmes based on regional characteristics and availability of resources. Our experience with educational summer camp (SC) for type 1 diabetic subjects is presented. The UNIFESP-ADJ SC aims to promote diabetes education at leisure with the participation of a multiprofessional team who has the opportunity to improve knowledge and skills in diabetes management. Seven-hundred-ninety subjects participated in 18 camps. The 9-day camp programme included adequate diet and exercise 3 times a day. Capillary glucose is monitored with appropriate insulin closes adjustments. The same questionnaire is applied at the beginning and end of the camping period in order to evaluate knowledge improvement in diabetes; they are invited to participate in educational daily meetings. Also the multiprofessional team meets every night for cases discussion. Anthropometric measurements, blood pressure, urine an blood samples are obtained. Individual recordings are provided to the respective families and physicians at the end of the camping period. The SCs have allowed diabetic subjects to recognize the possibility of a normal life. Improvement of knowledge in diabetes was confirmed by the comparison of questionnaires scores. They experienced the benefits of an adequate diet associated with exercise for glucose control and understood its importance to prevent long-term complications. Hypoglycemia occured more frequently, but they learned how to identify symptoms and to treat them. Blood pressure, plasma glucose and lipoproteins levels were reduced. The multiprofessional team recognized the role of diabetes education and developed skills to improve effectiveness of diabetes care. The complexity of diabetes treatment required the participation of the patient and its family in order to achieve metabolic control. Short-term benefits of diabetes education are seen by patients and their families. Assuming that metabolic control is necessary to prevent diabetic chronic complications, long-term benefits should be detected by the implementation of educational SCs for diabetic youngsters. The proposed modality of diabetes education in SCs showed to be reliable and effective, contributing to improve health of diabetic people and the quality of diabetes management. We concluded that such proposal should become more widespread.
Education; Diabetes Mellitus; Summer camps; Monitoring; Complications
