Project HOPE Launches Online Diabetes Educator Program to Health Professionals in India

IDEEL Program Poised to Train Thousands of Diabetes Educators Annually

Milwood, VA, August 16, 2013

Global NGO Project HOPE launched a groundbreaking online diabetes education course on Friday to help thousands of health professionals in India at the forefront of the fight against the disease to learn new skills and strategies needed to stem the advance of one of the world’s most serious public health problems.

IDEEL, the International Diabetes Educator E-Learning Program, builds on the Virginia-based NGO’s already wide ranging work on tackling diabetes. The International Diabetes Federation estimates that, without intervention, more than 552 million people will have the disease by 2030 and almost 80 percent of the 4.6 million people who die from the disease each year are in the developing world.

In an innovative new approach, Project HOPE, a global health education and humanitarian assistance organization, partnered with the Cornerstone OnDemand Foundation and the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd. to launch IDEEL. The program is an adaptation of HOPE’s award-winning India Diabetes Educator Project (IDEP), which has trained 3,621 health professionals, including nurses, nutritionists and physical therapists to encourage and secure healthy lifestyles and to work with physicians to provide optimal anti-diabetic medicines including insulin therapy.

IDEEL is packaged as a self-paced online learning program/curricula that can be accessed from anywhere. The program is enhanced by a minimum 15 day clinical internship under the guidance of an endocrinologist and diabetes educator. Once the student has successfully completed the online course and internship, he/she will have a life-enhancing understanding of diabetes management across a broad range of age groups.

The IDEEL program aims to

• Train up to 4,500 educators annually in India
• Train 100,000 educators worldwide by 2018
• Create a sustainable means of improving diabetes care and outcomes through online education

“India is grappling with the growing burden of treating diabetes and the complications that stem from uncontrolled high blood sugars such as kidney disease/failure, amputation, blindness and numerous other conditions. We believe IDEEL will be efficient and effective in reaching the scale required to address the chronic burden of diabetes, which is estimated to be  8.3% in India and will increase to 10% by 2030. The cost to treat a patient with diabetes in India is $68/year, where the average per capita income of $1100 creates a significant barrier for patients to seek medical treatment, let alone follow medical advice.  But graduates of the IDEEL program will be trained in diabetes self-management education (DSME) and able to help their patients improve blood sugar levels, cholesterol and weight, ”said Akiko Otani, Director of Operations and Program Management leading the team for the development of IDEEL.

Project HOPE’s diabetes work began in 1998 in China, where HOPE is the only U.S. NGO administering a diabetes education program.  The HOPE Centre in South Africa is a partnership with Eli Lilly and Company, and works with local NGOs, government, medical and academic stakeholders to address the needs of patients at risk of living with diabetes, hypertension and other chronic diseases.

“There’s an urgent need for more diabetes educators to reach communities still unfamiliar with how to recognize, treat and prevent the disease.  We are dealing with a public health crisis in the developed and now the rapidly urbanizing developing world where millions have diabetes and millions more are not even diagnosed or properly treated.  Millions more are at risk of developing diabetes putting businesses, communities and health systems at risk of a major productivity, financial and resource crisis in the future,” said Paul Madden, M.Ed., HOPE’s Senior Advisor for Non-Communicable Diseases.

About Project HOPE

Founded in 1958, Project HOPE (Health Opportunities for People Everywhere) is dedicated to providing lasting solutions to health problems with the mission of helping people to help themselves. Identifiable to many by the SS HOPE, the world’s first peacetime hospital ship, Project HOPE now provides medical training and health education, and conducts humanitarian assistance programs in more than 35 countries. Visit our website projecthope.org and follow us on Twitter @projecthopeorg.