DAWN Insulin Dialogue Tool launched at FEND 2008

New patient-centred strategies and practical tools for addressing psychosocial barriers to effective therapy were introduced at the satellite symposium: “New Tools for Changing Diabetes Therapy” held at the 13th Annual FEND.

This included the exciting new DAWN Insulin dialogue tool. The insulin dialogue tool helps the patient and the care team to work together to identify and address the most common psychosocial barriers preventing timely initiation of insulin therapy.

The insulin dialogue tool
The tool aims to enable patients to make confident treatment choices by minimizing anxiety. It is a practical guide developed to help professionals identify, explore and address patient concerns about starting insulin treatment. Rather than dictating to patients, it recommends an empathetic approach that involves asking open-ended questions and active listening.

With it, practitioners can probe deep-rooted patient concerns and attitudes towards starting insulin therapy, for example, the benefits of insulin, self-blame and health, daily life, social issues, injection issues and the risk of side-effects.

Validation of the toolkit
First version of the toolkit has its origin in the DAWN Japan programme involving more than 5000 diabetes professionals. After that members of the DAWN international advisory board were involved in the development of the tool and validation of the assessment instrument has been published in international peer review journal in 2008. Studies have been done with the insulin attitude scale that is included in the toolkit in US, Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, Serbia, Turkey, Germany.

Were the participants persuaded?
Judging by the enthusiastic questions and comments of the audience after the presentation, people were certainly ready to learn more. And by the end of the FEND congress, 135 diabetes nurses from a variety of countries have signed up to help provide feedback to the tool at their clinic!

Want to get involved?
If you would like to get a hard-copy of the DAWN Insulin Dialogue Tool to evaluate the tool, please send us an email on: dawninfo@novonordisk.com