Pares peritos como educadores: projeto de adaptação de um programa de educação para a autogestão em adolescentes com diabetes mellitus tipo 1

Abstract

The current health guidelines aim to increase the responsibility of people with chronic conditions to self-care, emphasizing the important role of health professionals on their empowerment and self-management skills education. The literature has highlighted educational programs for self-management of chronic condition as an holistic approach involving not only special health needs (treatment, therapy, physical well-being and functionality) but also the emotional, psychological and social needs. Some authors have proposed the use of self-management educational programs emphasizing the importance of the use peers, “lay-Led’s”, (self-management experts on the same chronic illness) as mentors on programs, like Lorig and Holman with adults and elderly population, and Malheiro with adolescent’s with spina bifida (Malheiro 2015). These programs have shown to be effective, with positive health outcomes, such as an improvement on adherence to therapy functionality, and decrease the use of emergency services and hospitalizations and reducing health costs. Thus, based on the education program designed by Malheiro we propose to adapt and implement this education program for self-management to adolescents with diabetes type 1 (DM1), using lay-led as educators, and evaluate their effectiveness on self-management competences, quality of life, self-efficacy, knowledge and HbA1c. This is a project distinguished by the innovative methodologies and strategies used like: mentoring between peers (social persuasion); lay led’s (modeling) and the psychoeducational strategies used in the sessions (e.g. questioning, brainstorming, problem solving, roleplaying, self-monitoring).