Needs Assessment: Neglected Principle in Diabetes Self-Management Education (a Qualitative Study)

Introduction: the most fundamental step in diabetes self-management education is needs assessment, which guarantees educational programs’ efficiency. This Article for aim explore and analyze education assessment in diabetes needs self-management education in Iran. Materials & Methods: this study is a qualitative one in which individual semi-structured interviews, purposeful sampling up to data saturation and content analysis method in order to do data analysis were used. The participants include 20 people of nurses and diabetes doctors and endocrinologists, with minimum 2 years of experience in treatment, care and education in the field of diabetes.Results: qualitative data analysis lead to emergence of three main categories of needs assessment without plan , needs assessment vitality and educators’ insufficient skill and eleven sub-categories were obtained.Conclusion: needs assessment without planning, lack of (recognition of essence and commitment to needs assessment, recognizing how the patient-family participation) and educators who are not familiar with needs assessment practical patterns means lack of planning for diabetes self-management education .Managers of diabetes centers need to plan seriously for upgrading education process and empowering the educators in using education principles and supervision on diabetes self-management education process.