Healthcare Implications and Guidelines to Ensure Type 1 Diabetes Students’ Well-being in Schools, Educational Facilities, and Surroundings

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) has become increasingly prevalent globally, leading to a number of challenges in the healthcare and educational sectors. Due to the complexity of its management, children with T1D often have a difficult time maintaining a healthy lifestyle alongside managing such a lifelong disease which requires intensive treatment on a daily basis. This study, therefore, aimed to identify those difficulties Thai children with T1D encountered both in and out of their educational settings. Furthermore, it sought to propose specific ways in which schools in Thailand and their surroundings can provide support to meet the children’s needs. Adopting an in-depth semi-structured interview with 7 individuals directly associated with T1D management, the result from both thematic and inductive analyses showed that despite a level of satisfaction in children with T1D’s own disease management, a better balance of dependable information, inclusiveness, independence-autonomy-flexibility, and intensive care, or “The 4 Is” in short, is critical to effective T1D management. The interviewees reported encouraging the 4 Is to be actively implemented by schools, parents, peers, and children with T1D themselves, as well as support the collaboration between them, to achieve holistic care of T1D and enhance children with T1D’s quality of life in general.