Spotlight on Leigh Caplan
Leigh Caplan is a certified diabetes nurse educator at Sunnybrook and the winner of the Banting and Best Diabetes Educator of the Year for 2012, presented by the University of Toronto's Banting & Best Diabetes Centre.
Leigh's passion for providing quality, evidence-based diabetes education and support for patients with diabetes as well as teaching and mentoring new practitioners in the field is demonstrated daily in her practice.
What is a diabetes nurse educator?
We educate patients about diabetes and about evidence-based clinical practice guidelines to help facilitate behavioural changes. And, in an academic centre, we do a lot of educating of physicians, fellows, residents and a lot of different students that we teach. But our biggest focus is the patient.
How did you get into this career?
My mother had Type 1 diabetes. I love to teach. I love to help people learn. I just like the idea of being proactive and changing people's lives for the better.
Over 95 per cent of diabetes care is self-care. My motivation is to help patients make behavioural changes to help them manage this chronic condition.
What is the best part of the job?
I like the challenge of helping people so they don't fall through the cracks. I've been involved in strategy around patient education within diabetes at Sunnybrook, and I like the idea of breaking down the silos and making it easier for patients to navigate the system to help improve their management and teaching them tools for self-management and behaviour change.
What is important to you when you first meet with a patient?
I always start from where the patient is at and I listen. I find out: What is your reason to be here? What do you want to get from meeting with me? It's important to build a rapport. With diabetes and any chronic health condition, the patients never really leave. People with diabetes will have acute issues that will bring them into an acute-care setting. But a lot of the care is about keeping them out of the emergency room and the hospital. We are really trying to teach behaviour change, and that never happens overnight. So the engagement is so critical to move people forward.
How do you teach rapport building to your health-care students?
I'm a facilitator of Choices and Change, which is a program out of the Institute of Healthcare Communication. A lot of my talks are about the psychological side of things and ways that you can engage the patient. I talk a lot about getting to know what your patient is here for.
Also, I think it's important to look at teams and team-building. Everyone wants to offer the patient the best care. And so do that, I think it's about the engagement of the whole team: Who likes to do what? Who is good at certain things? As a certified diabetes nurse educator, I'm required to know about the whole scope of diabetes. So for example, I have to know about nutrition, but I also respect the fact that I will never know as much as the dietitian. It's important to me that we offer the patient a whole team and that I know when to defer to one of my teammates.
How do you give negative feedback?
It's hard when we have to do everything we do as educators and health-care professionals to find the time for that one-on-one feedback. Communication really is key. Ensure that your learners feel comfortable to say when they don't understand something. And ensure you can offer them support to ensure they can understand-break something down further, or see if there are extra steps you can take to move them forward.
Congratulations on your Banting and Best Diabetes Educator of the Year Award.
Thank you! It was such an honour to be nominated. I respect all of the other nominees and their work so much. It was nice to see that my patients were happy to write letters about how I had helped them in support of my nomination. I really do love my job. It's so rewarding.
