Abstract
Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is a lifelong disorder that mostly happens any time
during childhood. It needs constant care and attention. Self-management becomes very
essential as there are multiple factors that influence management of blood glucose
levels and good outcomes. Diabetes education[1] is essential for this and it involves the process of providing the person with the
knowledge and skills needed to perform diabetes self-care, manage crises, and to make
lifestyle changes to successfully manage their life. It begins with teaching of survival
skills and continues with higher learning to fit diabetes into lives of people with
diabetes rather than changing the lives to manage diabetes. Although parents are responsible
for this initially, children must be part of this learning and journey as they are
the one who must deal with diabetes in their life.
Although knowledge transfer from scientific (truth and fact based) and narrative story
(experience and meaning based) is fundamentally different but narrative or stories
are better absorbed and retained. Storytelling and experience sharing are rapidly
developing fields in medical education, but its potential has yet to be realized in
medical education. The Changing Diabetes in Children program focused at reaching out
to the economically underprivileged children with T1DM has implemented the use of
stories to help the T1DM child learn to take insulin injections and understand the
basic do’s and don’t’s for proper diabetes management and motivate them to become
self-reliant and independent adults in long run.
Keywords
type 1 diabetes mellitus - diabetes education stories - motivation - good habits
