Diabetic foot workshop: A strategy for improving the knowledge of diabetic foot care providers.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Prevention and management of diabetic foot ulcer have essential effects on the quality of life of patients. Accordingly training the care providers can play an essential role in reducing complications foot ulcers and lead to an increase in the effectiveness and efficiency of patient health cares. We conducted a study to survey the impact of the diabetic foot workshop on the knowledge of nurses and physicians about diagnosis and managing diabetic foot. METHODS: The present study is a quasi-experimental which compare the knowledge of non-randomized group of nurses and physicians about diabetic foot care. The leaning objectives, agenda, contents and evaluation methods of the diabetic foot care workshop was designed by a multidisciplinary team members in form of 2 days workshop. Each topic of the workshop presented theoretically and practically using educational cases and real patient with diabetic foot ulcer. A valid and reliable questionnaire with 20 Multiple Choice Questions used for the evaluation of workshopin form of the pretest and posttest. RESULTS: In this study, 396 registered nurses and physicians participates in the diabetic foot workshop series. The results of this study showed that this increase in the level of knowledge was meaningful after the educational intervention since the mean of the posttest score increased more than 20% comparing with pretest. CONCLUSION: The promotion of knowledge of health care providers as shown in the study may almost be due to training by real patient, team-working, and using educational movies for the education of diabetic foot diagnosis, management and rehabilitation.

Diabetic foot workshop: Improving technical and educational skills for nurses.

Diabetes mellitus as one of the most common metabolic disorders has some complications, one of the main ones is diabetic foot (DF). Appropriate care and education prevents 85% of diabetic foot amputations. An ideal management to prevent and treat diabetic foot necessitates a close collaboration between the health team members and the diabetic patient. Therefore, improving nurses' knowledge about DF care and advancement in the quality of care provided by the nurses could significantly improve diabetic foot prevention and management. Therefore, the aim of DF workshop was to improve technical and educational skills of the nurses to prevent and manage diabetic foot. Considering the vital role of the nurses in providing DF care, EMRI decided to conduct Diabetic foot workshop for them. The following five steps were designed for the 14 coordinating sessions in the workshop: Goals definition, deciding about attendees, location selection, creating agenda, and developing a follow-up plan. "Diabetic Foot Workshop for Nurses" provides appropriate training to DF nurses at the national level; and combining theory and practice in this workshop not only increases nurses' knowledge, but also improves their skills in the field of the diabetic foot. Providing education and care to patients by DF nurse specialists instead of general nurses could be an important output of this workshop, which may lead to DF prevention and amputation decrease in the long term.