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OU Certificate To Tackle Diabetes In Fall


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The country's first undergraduate translation certificate program will tackle the topic of diabetes next fall at Ohio University.

Darlene Berryman, OU professor and program coordinator says she created the program to expose students to diabetes and trends in treating the disease beyond what the general health classes offer.

"From a personal standpoint, I wanted to create this core curriculum to give all the students kind of the full scope of what it means to have diabetes, how to treat it and how to look at it," she said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as many as one in three U.S. adults could have diabetes by 2050 if current trends continue.

The OU certificate will include three core classes: an online course that explores legal and medical issues, a clinical component that exposes students to trend in treating the disease and a capstone course that emphasizes research, clinical or service-learning experience.

Berryman says she's hopeful that other undergraduate certificates will be formed as a result of the diabetes program.

"I hope it's really popular, and I really would like to hope that maybe we consider doing this for other conditions as well because we need to be condition-specific in some ways. Instead, we learn pieces of different conditions in different classes and we never get an opportunity to look at it all together," she said.  "Diabetes is going to significantly impact our healthcare system so we need to be better informed."

The online class, "Bench to Bedside," is only being offered in the fall, but Berryman says she hopes to offer the class more than once a year in the future.