Vancomycin use in our teaching center often was inconsistent with HICPAC guidelines. Information from the audit will be useful for designing strategies to improve vancomycin use.

Vancomycin use in our teaching center often was inconsistent with HICPAC guidelines. Information from the audit will be useful for designing strategies to improve vancomycin use.

Diabetes mellitus is one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in the United States, showing an incidence of over 14 million individuals, with the numbers increasing yearly. Current evidence suggests that maintaining normal blood glucose levels will result in preventing or lessening the degree of acute and chronic complications of diabetes. Therefore, because many of the complications of diabetes may be prevented or lessened by strict glycemic control, it is of the utmost importance that the individual with diabetes understand the roles of diet, exercise, and insulin/oral hypoglycemics in the management of his or her diabetes. This is an area in which diabetic education plays an important role. The properly educated individual with diabetes can learn to increase or decrease insulin, to change diet, or to modify exercise regimens based on results of home blood glucose-monitoring to achieve normoglycemia. This article discusses a multidisciplinary team approach to educating the diabetic patient. This involves using the skills of physicians, pharmacists, nurses, dieticians, and other health care professionals, as well as teaching tools such as diabetes patient assessment forms, diabetes education, and teaching documentation records. It should become clear from this discussion the active role that pharmacists can play as an important member of the diabetic education team.

No abstract