King's College London

About the program

Welcome to the Women’s Wellness with Type 2 Diabetes Programme, we believe you are at the start of a valuable journey. This is a 12-week programme that will help you understand more about your diabetes, set in place positive eating and exercise and other lifestyle habits to make a difference to your overall health and wellbeing. It also includes an online peer support group involving peer supporters who are non-professional and between 45-65 years old living with type 2 diabetes.

There are four steps to this programme with each step taking three weeks to complete. In Step 1, we talk about type 2 diabetes, get you started on the program and provide you with practical healthy lifestyle coaching. Step 2 is about consolidating the changes you have made in the first few weeks. In Step 3, you will learn about important health issues for mid life women and you will be encouraged to maintain the healthy lifestyle habits you have started. Finally in Step 4, we want you to become independent and develop your own strategies to maintain your healthy lifestyle behaviours for the rest of your life. However, these steps can be tailored to your needs. So you will set up your own goals through WWDP and will access what information need to achieve your goals. Then you will be able to access a peer support group to discuss with peers and peer supporters during WWDP. This programme can be supported by peer supporters who will support your progress over the 12 weeks.

Program research

Research has revealed that certain lifestyle factors and health behaviours can have a positive impact upon quality of life, chronic disease risk factors and other health related areas, for women with type 2 diabetes.

A team of leading health researchers, led by Principal Investigator RN MSc Deniz Bozkurt, Academic supervisors are Dr Maria Duaso and Professor Jackie Sturt at King’s College London undertook a project to investigate the effectiveness of a 12 week structured lifestyle programme (new designed Women’s Wellness with Type 2 Diabetes Programme) in improving health and wellness in midlife women who have type 2 diabetes. The programme focuses on a range of health and self-management behaviours and has been developed especially for women with type 2 diabetes based on the latest research evidence. To be eligible for this research, please see below criteria:

• Women aged between 45 and 65 years
• A current diagnosis of T2DM
• Using medication to treat T2DM (insulin or oral medication)
• Living in the UK and with access to diabetes care in the NHS
• Able to read and speak English
• Access to a computer or laptop, reliable internet access and IT literacy (defined as being able to buy a product over the internet, search for a topic and send an email).
• not currently participation in another research.
• have a Facebook account or do accept to open a new Facebook account.
• receive all diabetes care through GP surgery.
• DD score above 2 on the DDS scale (Polonsky et al., 2005)

If you are eligible and interested in the Women’s Wellness with Type 2 Diabetes Programme, please fill in the survey or for more information please contact us at deniz.bozkurt@kcl.ac.uk. Please make sure to read the below documents before filling out the survey.