Project Dulce

Care for people with diabetes

Project Dulce is a diabetes care and education program that addresses the specific needs of culturally diverse populations. The program is dedicated to “Diabetes Excellence Across Communities," with a mission of improving the lives of people with diabetes through culturally appropriate, community-based diabetes management, education and support programs.

Initiated in 1997, Project Dulce was designed by a broad collaboration of San Diego health care and community-based organizations. To date, the program has managed thousands of ethnically diverse and low-income patients at Project Dulce program locations (PDF, 241 KB) throughout San Diego County.

The Project Dulce approach

The core of Project Dulce’s approach to patient care is a “Chronic Care Model.” A nurse-led team consisting of an RN/CDE (Certified Diabetes Educator), medical assistant, and dietitian provides clinical care in collaboration with the patient’s primary care provider.

The program’s other features include:

• Training for peer educators to provide diabetes self-management education and support to their peers.
• Clinical standards and algorithms used to guide treatment
• An electronic diabetes registry, used to track patient care, monitor compliance with standards and report clinical outcomes
• Extensive socio-cultural research to adapt its group education curriculum and approach to address the needs of African-American, Filipino, and Vietnamese communities

Diabetes management program design and implementation

In addition to helping patients, Project Dulce staff is available to train other health care providers how to design and implement a culturally appropriate diabetes management program. The patient education curriculum, patient handouts, peer educator training guide and operations manual are also available.

Multi-language patient handouts

To enable health providers and community organizations to better serve diverse populations with diabetes, Project Dulce has developed a series of graphic and simple-to-read educational handouts on over 20 topics related to diabetes care in 8 languages common to populations throughout California.

See our multi-language patient handouts for illustrated PDFs on diabetes management topics in eight languages.

For more information

To learn more about Project Dulce call 1-866-791-8154.