A taxonomy for diabetes educational interventions

Abstract

Diabetes education is a cornerstone of diabetes self-care management. Despite terrific progress in refining educational interventions, the diabetes literature continues to contain substantial inconsistencies in reporting the elements of educational interventions. This unnecessary variation in the quality of reporting has led to difficulties in understanding the results of educational research in diabetes. We provide a taxonomy that should prove helpful, both in the conceptual design of diabetes educational interventions and in the reporting of those interventions. An application of this taxonomy to 30 diabetes educational randomized controlled trials is presented to highlight the extent of variation in diabetes educational interventions.