Eureka! Institutional Repository

ABSTRACT Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease that is global and its frequency in both adults and children increases, causing an impact on their psychosocial well – being and at the same time overloading the health system in our country. Caring for children and adolescents with diabetes it is important that the teachers who work with them know about the disease to such an extent that they can support such students and encourage them to participate in all school activities like any other student. The purpose of this study is to investigate the knowledge and attitudes of teachers in both general education schools and special education schools within the Greek public education system on diabetes mellitus. The study consisted of 101 secondary education teachers (49.5% of general education and 50.5% of special education) from prefecture of Serres and was held between the months of May and June 2018. For the data collection an anonymous structured questionnaire closes type was used which included questions of knowledge about Diabetes mellitus, questions about how this knowledge was produced and questions about the importance of school nurse present in all schools. Data analysis was performed with IBM SPSS 21.0. The findings of the study suggests that special education teachers appear to have more knowledge regarding diabetes mellitus than the general education teachers. However, the level of knowledge seems to be on the low scale. Only a 18,2% of the participants was able to recognize the symptoms of a hypoglcaemic episode while only a 40% of the teachers was able to recognize the symptoms of hyperglycemia in a child with diabetes mellitus. On the other hand, a 93.1% of the teachers express appositive attitude towards education and 95% think that a school nurse is needed in both general education and special education schools. Proper care for a child with diabetes mellitus at school is based on educating teachers on issues related to proper management and treatment of diabetes mellitus.