The Nursery: peercoaching for people with type 2 diabetes
Stichting Je Leefstijl als medicijn is an online community of people with type 2 diabetes that coach each other to improve their lifestyle and diabetes. In this project this citizen initiative joins forces with Stichting Vitality Club in which people coach each other to a more active lifestyle and Quli BV that builds PGO’s (digital personal health environments) that allows people to get grip on their health and data. Here, people with diabetes can follow their progression. Leyden Academy and LUMC evaluate the project.
More than 1.1 million people in the Netherlands have type 2 diabetes. Currently, these people are treated as chronic patients that have to take pills to manage their disease. Recently however, there is clear evidence that lifestyle can improve their diabetes a lot, sometimes even bring it in complete remission. In this project we study how people can coach each other to improve their diabetes using their own data, without the need of health care professionals.
The approach that we take in this project is peercoaching. People with type 2 diabetes make use of their experience (experiential knowledge) and use this knowledge to coach others with the same disease. We combine two citizen initiatives in this project that use peercoaching and study if the combination of peercoaching with the PGO can help people to improve their type 2 diabetes.
In this project we discovered that peercoaching for people with type 2 diabetes combined with insight in their data can have substantial health benefits and improve diabetic control. People lost on average 8 kg of bodyweight in the first 6 months and maintained this over the years. Their bloodglucose levels also improved substantially. These health benefits are very promising, especially since people realise this themselves as a citizen initiative, without medical professionals help and costs to society.
