The AADE’s Mission And Goals
The AADE (American Association of Diabetes Educators) seeks to advance the role of the diabetes educator and improve the quality of diabetes education and care. We have several goals :
• Advance recognition of diabetes education as central to diabetes care
• Promote professional development
• Increase demand for diabetes education within the evolving health care system
• Develop the organization that effectively and efficiently meets member needs
Source: American Association of Diabetes Educators (www.aadenet.org)
Our main responsibility is to improve the lives of people with diabetes by advocating for them. We spend our careers making sure that the whole health care team understands that each patient was a person before he or she was a patient with diabetes. Members of the team must understand that patients’ entire lives and their families’ lives are affected by diabetes, and it is essential to treat each patient not just as a case but as a human being who has health problems.
We believe that a multidisciplinary team working together with a patient can help the patient do much better than a patient working alone with one health care provider, and now we have documentation to support this approach. The DCCT [Diabetes Control
and Complications Trial] showed that people who received intensive therapy with frequent visits with a health care team did better than those who were treated traditionally. The UKPDS [United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study] and several other studies have also shown the advantages of this multifaceted,
team approach.
We have to remember that the only person who can really control diabetes is the patient. If patients do not manage their diabetes, it does not matter what medications we tell them to take. They are the ones who choose what they eat; they are the ones who choose whether they will or will not exercise. So the biggest job diabetes educators have is to motivate patients to want to take care of themselves.
