ABSTRACT
Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of health education approach on the awareness of the diabetes knowledge among diabetic patients and to explore its influencing factors. Methods A total of 130 patients with diabetes mellitus who were hospitalized from 2015 to 2016 were enrolled in this study. Using self-control method, we compared the awareness rates of the diabetes knowledge at pre -hospital admission with pre-discharge from the hospital after the health education, and a logistic model was used to analyze related factors which might influence the awareness of the diabetes knowledge. Results Through health education, awareness rate of overall diabetes knowledge among patients increased from 18.90% to 75.59%. All the awareness rates of diabetes knowledge points increased significantly (all P<0.001) . After health education, the awareness rates of the knowledge on diabetes diagnosis basis and harmfulness of diabetes were still at the lowest level, accounting for 58.27% and 61.42% respectively, while the awareness rates of other diabetic knowledge were higher than 70%. Multivariable logistic regression analysis indicated that the OR value of improvement of overall awareness rate among diabetes patients younger than 50 years old was 0.040, compared to patients older than 50 years. The OR values among diabetes patients with less than 10 years, 10-19 years disease course were only 0.003 and 0.012, compared with patients with more than 20 years disease course. Conclusion Health education can effectively improve the awareness rates of diabetes knowledge in general. However, the intervention effectiveness was unsatisfactory among elder people or patients with short disease course.