Perspective is everything when you are experiencing the challenges of life. – Joni Earackson Tada
In this new year, are you looking to add a fresh perspective to your diabetes care and education conversations?
Over the past two years, through this blog and our research publications and presentation we’ve been sharing tips and guidance to help diabetes care and education specialists incorporate principles of solution-focused practice into their conversions with clients. At its core, solution-focused practice is based on relationship building between the client and the clinician who acts as a “think partner.” The overarching themes of most of our blogs help the diabetes care and education specialist to view their interactions with a new perspective and challenge them to think differently. (With the mention of “overarching” we thought the photo above as fitting for our “fresh view” for this post.)
With the rapid evolution of technology-enabled care during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been discussing the need to focus some of our learnings to support the use of solution-focused principles when incorporating technology into care and education. So, we’ve decided to launch a series of blog posts focused on different aspects of technology-enabled diabetes care and education and incorporating solution-focused principles. Over the next few posts we’ll write about various technologies that impact and influence diabetes care and education including diabetes apps, digital health tools, diabetes devices, online peer support and online coaching.
In the meantime, there are two papers focused on incorporating technology into practice that we encourage you to check out. They were published by colleagues (including Deb) in August 2020 in The Diabetes Educator journal (now The Science of Diabetes Self-Management and Care):
- One paper discussed a 3-step framework for systematically incorporating technology into practice called the Identify, Configure, Collaborate (ICC) Framework. You can read more about applying the framework here.
- The second paper used continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) as an exemplar for integrating technology into practice. In this paper a simplified process for evaluating CGM data was presented. This DATAA model (an acronym for download data, assess for safety, time in range, areas to improve and action plan) not only simplifies data interpretation, but also includes solution-focused principles along with strength-based language practices to empower people to use their data for learning and behavior change.
Stop back by in two weeks to see which technology to impact and influence diabetes care and education that we focus on first!
We welcome anyone interested in our approach to Subscribe to our blog and we’ll email you when a new post is published!
If you are a health care professional and interested in learning more about our solution-focused practice and approach, when you subscribe to our blog, we’ll send you in return a FREE resource of 10 Solution-Focused Questions to start a solution-focused discussion with your clients.
Deb is employed by Dexcom but her words and opinions in this blog are her own.
