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This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

Welcome to this podcast series on diabetes, brought to you by the National Diabetes Education Program or NDEP. NDEP is a joint initiative of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. This podcast is taken from the NDEP video, Five Communities Reach Out.

The Chinese people for thousands of years really valued their health. They are very much into early morning exercise, meeting friends -- it’s wonderful.

I’m Lydia Hsu and I’m Director of Health Services Counseling here at NEMS, North East Medical Services.

And I’m Peggy Wong. I’m a Registered Nurse and Certified Diabetes Educator, counseling patients with diabetes.

The Chinatown and the Chinese community is very close knit. People, even though they move outside, they still want to come in like everyday to shop and see, you know, people on the street.

This is like a large one, and this is a medium one, and then a small one. And this is about the size of a 15 gram.

Remember when you showed them how much rice they could have? They all gasped.

It’s like in Hong Kong and in China, the food and stores are all flowing out into the street, and I think they feel a warmth coming back here to do their daily, their daily things.

NEMS is a community health center and we serve everyone in the San Francisco area, and we are a one stop shopping type of facility. For so many years, we had an interest in diabetes in this community.

She says the fact that she’s able to check her own blood sugar, do her own insulin, she finds it quite easy and makes her life much easier.

We have felt in the past that there had not been too much of a national support, so now, with the National Diabetes Education Program, both of us feel very, very good that such focus is taking place.

Now we have a focus and we could really use our knowledge of the community to spread the word. So in the last ten years, we have been having a TV program and three radio programs in our language --- in Cantonese language. So with that, we feature six programs on diabetes.

People are watching TV a great deal and that’s one way to reach the mass and surprisingly, a lot of patients watch these programs and receive some education through it. Using the cable channel to broadcast health-related issues has been very successful. I think it’s not that difficult to get into the ethnic media. The local cable channels are probably quite interested in some focus on health care.

After we do the broadcast, we show them in our waiting rooms. So everyday, about 300 people come through and they have to sit there while they are waiting for the doctors or our dentists, and they have to watch it. We use different ways to reach the people in the community. Besides the radio and TV, we use one– to–one, we have street fairs, our presence is always there. We feel like we are very much a part of the community and people just embrace us, because they know we love them, right. And all the hard work is really worth it.

They will come right to me and say that, “I checked my blood sugar this morning and it was such and such. Do you think it’s ok?” It shows that they feel good about, about where they have received their care, and always remember us. It’s wonderful. I feel that we are making a difference in this community. At least for me, in terms of diabetes.

To order your copy of the Five Communities Reach Out video, visit www.ndep.nih.gov or call the National Diabetes Education Program at 1-800-438-5383.

To access the most accurate and relevant health information that affects you, your family and your community, please visit www.cdc.gov.