NURS 440 Week 6 Health Education Program Part 2: Presentation Example

Eating Well With Diabetes on a Tight Budget: A PRECEDE-Based Community Health Plan, Lesson Plan and Presentation Synopsis

Community Health Plan

Social assessment. The neighborhood around the church values its churches, its sense of looking out for one another and the food pantry, which serves about 120 households a week. Residents interviewed in the community assessment named food costs and diabetes as everyday concerns.

Epidemiological assessment. For the city as a whole, the CDC's modeled estimates put adult food insecurity at 16.2 percent, diagnosed diabetes at 11.0 percent and obesity at 36.4 percent (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2025). Food insecurity and diabetes together raise the risk of poor glucose control, because affordable foods are often high in refined carbohydrates.

Behavioral and environmental assessment. Key behaviors are choosing lower-sugar, higher-fiber foods within a limited budget and monitoring blood glucose. Environmental factors include limited fresh food within walking distance and pantry stock dominated by boxed and canned goods.

Educational and ecological assessment. Predisposing factors include beliefs that healthy food is always expensive and limited knowledge of reading labels for sugar and carbohydrates. Reinforcing factors include family meal habits and support from pantry volunteers. Enabling factors include access to lower-sugar pantry items and the skill to plan meals from them. Maurer and Smith (2013) describe this phase as the heart of the model, because education should target the specific factors that drive behavior.

Administrative and policy assessment. The pastor agreed to host the session, the pantry coordinator agreed to set aside lower-sugar staples for a month and the regional food bank allows pantries to request diabetes-appropriate items. Seligman et al. (2022) found that adding diabetes-appropriate food boxes, self-management education, referrals and glucose monitoring to usual pantry services significantly improved food security among 568 adults with diabetes, which supports pairing education with changes in what the pantry offers.

Health Education Lesson Plan

Presentation Synopsis

I delivered the 30-minute session in the church fellowship hall on a Thursday evening before the weekly pantry distribution. Preparation took most of a week: I met with the pantry coordinator to learn which items would be in that week's boxes, bought a sample of each so participants could handle real products, printed the handout in large type at a sixth-grade reading level and arranged chairs in a semicircle around a table so everyone could see the demonstration. I also asked the pastor to announce the session the Sunday before, since residents told me announcements from the pulpit reach more people than flyers. Eighteen adults attended, most of them pantry clients; eleven said they or a family member had diabetes. Jin et al. (2022) describe how a food bank can serve as a platform for community health education when the education is tailored to needs identified through assessment, and holding the session where people already came for food made it easy to attend.

The opening question drew more discussion than I planned. Several participants said fresh vegetables spoil before they can be used and that sugar-free products cost more. I adjusted by spending more time on frozen and canned vegetables without added salt, which are affordable and keep. The plate demonstration worked best: participants used actual pantry cans and boxes to build a plate, and several were surprised that a can of beans could replace part of a pasta portion. The label activity was harder; small print and unfamiliar terms slowed people down, so I simplified it to finding the words "added sugars" and the number beside them. Two older participants had left their reading glasses at home, and a volunteer read the labels aloud for them, which reminded me that print is a barrier in itself and that future sessions should include magnifiers and large-print label examples.

During the question period, a man asked whether he should stop eating fruit because of sugar, which let me explain fiber and portions. A woman asked how often to check her blood sugar, and I encouraged her to ask her provider and gave her the free clinic's information. I used teach-back by asking two volunteers to explain how they would fill their plates at home. Rosa et al. (2026) found teach-back most consistently associated with improved knowledge, self-care and adherence across studies in cardiovascular care, and it showed me which points had landed.

Sixteen of the 18 attendees completed the five-question survey.

The results suggest the plate method objective was met for most participants, while label reading needs more practice, which matches what I saw. The most common written comment asked for recipes. If I repeated the session, I would bring a recipe card for each pantry staple and shorten the label segment to a single comparison. I would also invite a client who manages diabetes well on a limited budget to share one tip, since several participants listened most closely when other attendees spoke, which fits the PRECEDE emphasis on reinforcing factors such as peer support. Educational programs built on PRECEDE have shown measurable gains in other populations, such as improved dietary and treatment behaviors among hemodialysis patients in a controlled study (Sariaslan & Kavurmaci, 2026), but a single session cannot show behavior change. The pastor asked me to return in two months, which would allow a follow-up survey on whether participants made the swaps they planned. The pantry coordinator also agreed to keep a shelf labeled "lower sugar choices" for the next month and to track how quickly those items are taken, a simple measure of whether the enabling factor changed. For me, the evening showed the difference between hospital teaching and community teaching: in the hospital, I teach one patient who must listen; in the fellowship hall, I had to earn the attention of eighteen people who could leave at any time, and the questions they asked told me far more about their lives than any assessment form. A health education session works best when the lesson and the pantry shelf change together.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2025). PLACES: Local data for better health, county data 2025 release [Data set]. https://data.cdc.gov/d/swc5-untb

Jin, X., Ezeonwu, M., Ayad, A., & Bowman, K. (2022). Using a food bank as a platform for educating communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Community Health Nursing, 39(1), 50-57. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370016.2022.2037052

Maurer, F. A., & Smith, C. M. (2013). Community/public health nursing practice: Health for families and populations (5th ed.). Elsevier Saunders.

Rosa, D., Nardin, E., Aristolao, S., Sucapuca Ccana, R., Poliani, A., & Manara, D. F. (2026). Use of the teach-back method in adults with cardiovascular disease: A scoping review. Healthcare, 14(14), 2093. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare14142093

Sariaslan, A., & Kavurmaci, M. (2026). Evaluation of the effect of the PRECEDE PROCEED model-based education program on hemodialysis patients' treatment compliance, healthy lifestyle behaviors, and quality of life. Medicine, 105(28), e49759. https://doi.org/10.1097/MD.0000000000049759

Seligman, H. K., Levi, R., Ridberg, R., Smith, M., Hills, N., & Waxman, E. (2022). Impact of enhanced food pantry services on food security among adults with diabetes using a crossover study design. Current Developments in Nutrition, 6(4), nzac021. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdn/nzac021