Sweet Life’s big focus for 2020 is diabetes education research, in alignment with the Diabetes Alliance. As South Africa’s diabetes community, we offer an online space to share information and advice about living well with diabetes, both here on the website and on Diabetic South Africans. But we also want to help bring this education offline, into people’s lives. Each month, we’ll be sharing the research we’ve done into diabetes education in public clinics, in the hopes that it helps someone else looking for answers to diabetic questions! This is the final report for 2020. If you want to read the other months, scroll to the bottom of the page.
November focus:
The focus this month was 100% on National Diabetes Month: the one month a year that everyone wants to talk about diabetes in the media. We also wrap up projects for the year.
DiabetesConnect update:
Following the Diabetes Alliance request that was sent out to all members of the Diabetes Alliance, we have two companies who are interested in funding the project. They are discussing funding directly with Praekelt.org. We will need to do a chunk of the project at a time, due to budget constraints because of COVID-19.
Diabetes Food Guide booklet
We have started collecting feedback on the Diabetes Food Guide, a collaboration with Pick n Pay and supported by Sanofi. Rebone Ntsie, the Director of Nutrition at the National Dept of Health, will be providing feedback in early January, and we will make adjustments to the book following her feedback, so that it can ideally be used as an NDoH resource in 2021.
National Diabetes Month campaign
Sweet Life’s November campaign is a 1-minute Type 2 diabetes risk factor video that makes it easy to count off risk factors on your fingers, while watching cute pets. It is being distributed on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and our website. The goal this November is to use the interest created in diabetes by COVID-19 to encourage all South Africans to know the risk factors of Type 2 diabetes, and get tested if necessary. Media appearances included:
Television interviews
- Health Talk SABC 2 (3 repeats)
- Kyknet
- ENCA
- SABC News
- Afternoon Express
Radio interviews
- Smile FM
- SAFM (twice)
- 5fm (twice)
- Channel Africa
- Good Hope FM
- Heart FM
Online
The 2020 Diabetes Education Project by Sweet Life is supported by Pick n Pay and BD.
[…] But we are South Africa’s largest online diabetes community, and we do a lot of diabetes education research, and we co-founded the Diabetes Alliance. So we have a good handle on the diabetes situation in […]
[…] 2020, we decided to get to the bottom of diabetes education and figure out exactly what we need to know – and nothing more. To do that, we asked all […]
[…] recognised there is a need for basic foundational diabetes education after speaking to doctors and healthcare workers in public clinics. So much of the basics of diabetes are not understood – by those living with diabetes and the […]