Dissemination of diabetes prevention intervention in the community: development and implementation of a survey for lifestyle coaches working in the trenches

In the U.S., approximately 78.6 million adults are categorized as obese and over 29 million have type 2 diabetes. The high prevalence of these conditions is a pressing public health issue. The Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), a research study funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), demonstrated that type 2 diabetes could be prevented or delayed through weight loss and physical activity. To provide this lifestyle intervention education in the community setting, the Group Lifestyle Balance Program (GLB) was adapted from the DPP. This program, delivered by trained lifestyle coaches, has been shown to successfully reduce diabetes and cardiovascular risk factors for at-risk adults. Coaches are trained by the Diabetes Prevention Support Center (DPSC), which also offers support for these coaches as they deliver the program in their own settings across the nation. The purpose of this project is to contact these trained coaches in order to 1) track implementation of the GLB program in the community, 2) improve training, and 3) enhance DPSC support for delivery of the program in the community. A team effort was utilized to create a survey that was distributed to the DPSC network of over 2,000 trained GLB coaches. Survey content was adapted from a previously used DPSC survey, and was transferred from the SurveyMonkey program to the Qualtrics system. This 52-question survey was sent via email to the network of over 2,000 coaches and gathered information about the effectiveness of training workshops, implementation of GLB in the community, challenges of program execution, and support needed for the coaches. From a public health perspective, the data collected will be very important in that it will facilitate dissemination of diabetes prevention on a wide-spread scale through delivery of the GLB program