• Fresh Views

    OPPORTUNITIES : Today’s word to jump-start solution-focused practice

    Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try ~ Author unknown

    Deb’s new hummingbird feeder creating opportunities to catch an up close view of these beautiful tiny birds

    In this new virtual world, Deb had the opportunity to attend the virtual American Diabetes Association (ADA) Scientific Sessions, from the comfort of her home office! While we @AFreshPOVforYou really enjoy the social aspect of attending in-person conferences, Deb embraced this virtual opportunity and found some interesting presentations.Today we want to focus on and share with you one particularly outstanding session.

    Today’s word is: OPPORTUNITIES

    If you follow our blog, you know that we’re in a series which addresses a client-focused approach to a solution-focused practice word each post. So we want to think about today’s word OPPORTUNITIES in relation to diabetes care and education specialists embracing some learnings from ADA Scientific Sessions.

    One presentation in particular that garnered much attention was the ADA’s 2020 Diabetes Educator of the Year Award Lecture by recipient Dr. Bill Polonsky. His lecture,Tedious, tiresome and dull’: Strategies to improve diabetes self-management education” was thought-provoking and insightful. Dr. Polonsky stressed that diabetes care and education specialists need to make education meaningful to those living with diabetes, and it can’t be focused simply on a checklist of content. We are of like mind as Dr. Polonsky, and believe there are new opportunities to engage with people with diabetes. Rather than working through a list of content that may or may not be relevant to your client, why not incorporate a solution-focused approach, and turn attention to the individual, their needs, their skills and strengths they already possess. This solution-focused approach is one OPPORTUNITY to address the challenge of “tedious, tiresome and dull education”.

    To spur thinking about different opportunities you can create in your practice to make diabetes self-management education and support meaningful, we want to share 3 of our previous blog posts:

    1. Co-design. Last April we discussed the concept of “co-design” and how gaining input from people with diabetes around the content and structure of diabetes services is critically important. You can read about co-design here.  
    2. Strengths-based language. In 2018, we wrote about using person-first, strengths-based language here. We continue to believe that this practice is essential for successful diabetes care and education.  
    3. New perspectives. In September 2019, we shared a glimpse of our presentation at the international European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) conference. We began that post with this quote by Marcel Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” We’d like to encourage fellow health care professionals to “have new eyes” in relation to diabetes management, and be open to new tools and solutions.This different view through “new eyes” may lead to creating incredible, innovative and visionary opportunities to evolve diabetes self-management education and support services.

    Our solution-focused challenge for you this week is to start each session with your clients by doing one solution-focused activity to create new opportunities.  Here are a few examples:

    Ask your client:

    • What would need to happen to make your meeting valuable to them?
    • What 3 questions do they want to discuss today?
    • What strengths do they already have that you can build upon today?

    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. 

    Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @AFreshPOVforYou

  • Fresh Views

    Relatable Individualized Solution-focused Education: A Sneak Peek from the @AFreshPOVforYou Retreat

    Relax. Refresh. Renew. Play. Sing. Laugh. Enjoy. Forgive. Dance. Love. Hug. Share. Kiss. Create. Explore. Hope. Listen. Dare. Trust. Dream. Learn. TODAY! ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience


    A view of the gardens at the West Baden Springs Resort in French Lick, Indiana

    We posted this blog back in April during our Fresh POV for You retreat. There continues to be much interest in our work! Since we are traveling this week to present some of our research at the European Association for the Study for Diabetes (EASD) conference in Barcelona, Spain, we thought it timely to revisit this post with a few updates!

    In the spirit of travel, this week’s blog is a re-post from French Lick Indiana, home of Larry Bird of Celtics fame, and also the French Lick and West Baden Springs resorts. Working together, but on opposite ends of the country, (Tami in Kentucky and Deb in California) means we have to be creative finding opportunities for in-person meetings. Luckily, things came together……. a spouse work meeting in Ohio, and a visit with a son the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, created the opportunity for our first formal @AFreshPOVforYou board meeting.

    Over the past several months we have been exploring ideas around creating innovative diabetes education programs and services that are co-designed by people living with diabetes or prediabetes. Basically that means, we are attempting to actively involve people with or at risk for diabetes in the design process to ensure the end result meets their needs.

    If you’ve been reading our blog, then you know that we love “fresh views” and spending time together enjoying beautiful scenery and experiences.  We feel energized and are more creative thinkers when we take a break, are relaxed, seeing things from a new perspective, laughing together, and often with a nice glass of wine!


    Enjoying a horse and carriage ride through the Indiana countryside

    Over the past year we’ve been planning, thinking, strategizing, writing and sharing our ideas with others in the diabetes community to make sure we are on the right track. Incorporating our practice of using solutions focused coaching, we’ve been asking ourselves, “What’s working well for us and what do we want to do more of?”  On a personal note, a few of those replies include the following:

    • Do hard work in the morning when our minds are most creative
    • Take activity breaks
    • Embrace humor
    • Incorporate things that make us happy and that we find joy in
    • Express gratitude for what we see and experience
    • Plan for future retreats to keep us on track and advancing our vision

    We’ve taken a set of possibilities and turned them into opportunities and are excited to see our vision for the future starting to become a reality! Our March 20, 2019 blog shared learnings from a Twitter chat that we co-hosted with the diabetes online community focused around what would bring joy when engaging in diabetes education services. We had some insightful and amazing feedback. We decided that we really needed to dig deeper, and find more opportunities for people living with or at risk for diabetes to guide us as we design programs and services. So following the Twitter chat we released a survey and had a fantastic response. We followed up the survey with some focus groups.

    We have learned that many are not happy with the diabetes education services they have received in the past and there’s great opportunity to innovate and evolve. We had similar responses from both the Twitter chat, survey and focus groups.  People are interested in community and learning from others living with diabetes; they want individualized education and not a “canned program”; and they want to be an equal team member whose experience and knowledge is valued and appreciated.

    For our focus groups, we employed MDR Consulting, a national business research firm to conduct and summarize the data for us so we can learn more and identify how we might design programs and services that will provide relatable, individualized, solution-focused education (and actually bring people joy)! Our goal is that the voice of the person living with diabetes will be clear and lead the way.

    As a thank you for our focus group participants, we’ve been engaging in complimentary solution-focused coaching sessions with them. These interactions have truly brought to light the value and benefits of a solution-focused coaching approach (rather than focusing on trying to “fix problems”).

    We are excited for the future and our next steps! We’ve been writing and have submitted papers to a couple of journals that we are hopeful will be published soon. We’re excited to be presenting some of our research Friday at the EASD conference. And, we’re in the planning stages to conduct a research study incorporating solution-focused coaching. Exciting times!

    Thanks for being on this journey with us. We look forward to sharing our goals and dreams with you and are eager for your feedback.

    If you are a health care professional and interested in learning more about our solution-focused practice and approach, we invite you to subscribe to our blog, and we will send you in return a FREE resource of 10 Solution-Focused Questions to start a solution-focused discussion with your clients. 

    Subscribe to our blog and we’ll email you when a new post is published!

    Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @AFreshPOVforYou.

  • Fresh Views

    Co-design: How we are engaging people living with diabetes in designing diabetes education services


    A new day dawning

    Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is. –Dave deBronkart, Let Patients Help

    Imagine with us…… a square table. On one side sits the healthcare team. On the other sits their patient living with diabetes. The healthcare team has created a plan and program of great things for their patient that they think their patient needs…without once asking for any input or perspective of that patient – the one who actually lives with diabetes 24/7/365. What if instead, at that same table, everyone is sitting on the same side. The individual living with diabetes was included in the discussion and decision making from the very beginning. The plan and program was crafted around their input. That’s an illustration of co-design. And that is something we strongly believe in. What if relatable individualized solution-focused education services for people with diabetes were co-designed with people living with diabetes?

    What exactly is co-design?

    The Institute for Healthcare Improvement defines co-design in the following way: “Co-design involves the patients in the design process and works with them to understand their met and unmet needs…..This enables us to incorporate the patient perspective directly and immediately.”   In theory it doesn’t sound complicated, but it doesn’t seem to happen very often. The healthcare profession has a long history of the clinician being the “expert” and the patient being the one to “follow orders”. Often, programs and services are designed by the medical staff, independent of patient input. Some more evolved health systems are adding patient and family advisory councils to get feedback and input. However well meaning, they’re often not facilitated to the full potential.With co-design, everyone has an equal say in creating the solution. It is not spending time just getting feedback about programs you’ve already designed….it’s about including people in the decisions from the very beginning.  

    So instead of the healthcare team solving problems they think exist, co-design allows a multi-stakeholder team to first identify the problem that really exists and then develop solutions together. People living with diabetes know what’s worked for them and what hasn’t, and how they would create a program if they had the chance. This is truly a person centered approach to care.

    How has @AFreshPOVforYou been engaged in co-design?

    Supported by a three-year PCORI award, the Intercultural Diabetes Online Community Research Council, affectionately known as, iDOCr, was born (which Deb is a part of). The goal of PCORI is to help patients make more informed healthcare decisions by supporting research that compares the effectiveness of existing, known and proven treatments. All PCORI projects involve patients from the very beginning of every research study or community engagement project. With the iDOCr funding, a stakeholder group was created that represented researchers, clinicians, people working in industry, non-profit organizations and people affected by diabetes (people living with type 1 and type 2 diabetes and caregivers). Both English and Spanish-speaking individuals were included.Together, over the three-year award, this team developed a research question that was important to the group with the goal of eventually receiving funding to conduct the study. One of the main outcomes of this award was very interesting to us….although the majority of the iDOCr patient representatives lived with type 1 diabetes, the team decided to develop a research study focused on type 2 diabetes in the Hispanic community, because that is where they saw the need. This is the essence of co-design; preconceived ideas might have encouraged a completely different research question. The team is about to embark on the research study very soon, so stay tuned for more information. You can learn more about iDOCr via Facebook, Twitter and read the Blogs here.

    We also led the development of two videos to educate about the use of person first language in diabetes.  These 2 videos “Why Language Matters” and “Changing the Conversation” were written and produced using co-design principles. The background and supporting information was first taken from the 2017 paper, The Use of Language in Diabetes Care and Education jointly published by AADE and the ADA. We wanted to understand how language has directly impacted people living with diabetes by learning about real world experiences. We also wanted to learn from healthcare providers how they used empowering, person first language in their practices. So, we developed questions and asked the diabetes community to answer them. We were so overwhelmed with responses that we knew people really wanted to share their stories about why #LanguageMatters to them. From these stories we crafted the scripts for the two films and then we sent the scripts back out to the diabetes community to make sure we got it right. Finally, the videos were filmed with those same individuals, not actors, but people living in the diabetes community. The amazing, talented and Telly award winning creative director from Mytonomy, Mr. Kevin Kuchar created videos that we are so proud of and really reflect the true emotion that language can create and why the language we use in healthcare has a direct impact on outcomes and well being. Read our November, 2018 blog Language can change your POV!

    How are we using co-design now?

    Currently, we are using co-design to help us create diabetes services that resonate with people living with diabetes. Our efforts began with a #DSMA Twitter Chat with the diabetes online community. Questions for the group focused around how diabetes education could bring them joy (read our blog to learn about this discussion). From this information we developed a survey to dive deeper and learn more. One finding from the survey was that most people with diabetes are not familiar with the concept of co-design, which told us that it’s not happening much in the healthcare space where diabetes is being managed. We’d like to change this practice and share with others how its done!  Our next step is to hold a focus group. Each step along the way, we are learning new things.

    We’ll be excited to share out focus group outcomes and learnings later this year. Stay tuned!

    As e-patient Dave said, we want to “let patients help” us move diabetes education services forward in partnership with the real experts, those living with diabetes 24/7/365.

    Subscribe to our blog and we’ll email you when a new post is published!

    Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @AFreshPOVforYou.

  • Fresh Views

    Finding joy: In life and through diabetes education services



    Tami and Deb “finding joy” in Glencoe, Scotland a couple of years ago

    Joy is strength. – Mother Teresa

    Today is the 1st day of spring! The sun, warmer weather, and flowers in bloom definitely sparks joy for us. On the topic of “sparking joy”, @AFreshPOVforYOU had the opportunity to moderate the #DSMA Twitter Chat last Wednesday 3/13/19. We had a great discussion that delved into finding joy in life, as well as in diabetes education. (We’d like to hear your thoughts too! If you’re willing to share, click the link to a survey here or at the end of this blog).

    This topic of sparking or finding joy, was inspired by @MarieKondo and her Netflix show about her KonMari method. Are you familiar with her and her wildly popular method of organizing, the KonMari method? Basically, it consists of gathering together one’s belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that “spark joy”. If they don’t spark joy, then you thank them, and let go of them. (The KonMari method also inspired us to get an early start on spring cleaning!)  Maybe you’re not into organizing, that’s okay. But this concept of what sparks joy…it got us thinking about how we could apply it to diabetes and explore how diabetes education may spark joy.

    During the chat, conversation began with what sparks joy for people in their own life, and then turned to when engaging with the diabetes online community (DOC). We asked participants to summarize in one word their experience with the DOC. Here are some of the words people shared: unifying, heartening,  inspiring, awesome, knowledge, enlightening, meaningful, village and yes, joyful!  

    So how can those same words be used to describe engaging diabetes education services?

    We discussed the concept of co-design and wanted to learn if people with diabetes designed a diabetes education program or service, what would they include and how would they design it?  And ideally, what would spark joy for them when participating in a service or program? We heard some really interesting ideas that resonated with the solutions focused approach we are incorporating in our services.  

    Here are some of the thoughts and suggestions:

    • Diabetes is more about the person, than the numbers and gadgets!
    • Experienced people with diabetes (PWD)  teaching newbies
    • Personalized, person centered, there is no “right way” or “one way” to do anything.  Let people choose from a variety of options.
    • Several mentioned meeting people where they are, focusing on strengths, and not worrying about getting “straight A’s”, but realizing everyone is unique
    • Use of technology
    • Self-advocacy
    • Focus on emotional health and goal setting
    • PWD telling their stories
    • Stronger connection to others with diabetes, Interacting with others who have diabetes
    • Be community-based
    • Incorporate personality questions
    • We were really inspired by the amazing @KellyRawlings who thought that “joy” should be one of the AADE7 self-care behaviors for managing diabetes!

    We observed an overwhelming commonality of people wanting or needing to connect more with other PWD as they are learning about living with diabetes. As we closed out the chat, we challenged participants to do something every day that sparks joy in life!  So today, that is our challenge to you too. Do something for yourself, or for others that sparks joy! And if it helps you, track your experiences and feelings in a gratitude journal.

    Thank you to @DiabetesSocMed and Cherise for allowing us to moderate the chat and engage in a fast and fun chat, it really sparked joy for us!

    Would you like to help us learn more about what would make an ideal diabetes education experience?

    At A Fresh POV for you, our goal is to co-design innovative diabetes education services. If you or someone you know has type 2 diabetes or prediabetes and would be interested in participating in a focus group about co-designing education, please complete this survey which will take less than 5 minutes.

    Subscribe to our blog and we’ll email you when a new post is published!

    Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @AFreshPOVforYou.