Peer Support in Diabetes Management - Insulin Peer Support

The development of contemporary diabetes care offers new hope for long and satisfying lives of those with the disease, but also provides increased challenges for integration across the many dimensions of care (varied medications in addition to insulin, specialty services, diet, physical activity, stress management, etc.) and across the many who contribute to care (specialists, primary care providers, nurses, dietitians and patient educators, family members, friends, worksites). The Shanghai Integration Model (SIM) has made great strides to integrating specialty/hospital care with primary/community care. The addition of peer support can enhance patient engagement within that integrated care. Peer support can also integrate care with the daily behaviors and patterns that optimal diabetes management requires and with the family members and others in individuals' daily lives who can support diabetes management. The "Insulin Peer Support" project is a sub-project of "Peer Support in Diabetes Care", with special focus on appropriate insulin use in the community, to help overcome barriers in insulin treatment and improve treatment compliance. This project will develop a peer support model for diabetes management in Chinese patients undergoing insulin treatment and evaluate its effectiveness in a randomized controlled trial of 10 CHCs in Shanghai. The project is a collaboration among the Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Shanghai Diabetes Institute,the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning, the Shanghai Centers for Disease Control, and, at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Peers for Progress, widely recognized for its leadership in promoting peer support in health care and prevention.