The impact of nursing staff education on diabetes inpatient glucose management: a pilot cluster randomised controlled trial

Abstract Background An increasing number of patients in hospital have diabetes, with most of them cared for by non-specialist staff. The effect of diabetes education for staff on patient outcomes, as well as the most effective method of staff education is unclear. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare diabetes outcomes in medical wards where nursing staff were offered one face-to-face (F2F) session followed by access to online education (online), F2F education only, or standard care (control). Methods We conducted a pilot cluster randomised controlled trial involving 16-weeks baseline/rollout followed by a 28-week post-intervention period across three medical wards (clusters) in a Sydney Teaching Hospital. The online ward provided an online competency-based diabetes education program and 1-h F2F teaching from a diabetes nurse educator (DNE), the F2F ward provided four separate 1-h teaching sessions by a DNE, with no additional sessions in the control ward. The primary outcome was length of stay (LOS); secondary outcomes included good diabetes days (GDD), hypoglycaemia and medication errors. Poisson and binary logistic regression were used to compare clusters. Results Staff attendance/completion of ≥ 2 topics was greater with online than F2F education [39/48 (81%) vs 10/33 (30%); p