KCC ~ Kevin's Community Center - Free Medical Clinic for Newtown, CT Residents

Diabetes Clinic - Maureen Moore

Kevin’s Community Center diabetes program strives to have a positive impact on the care and treatment of its diabetic patients. In order to have this positive impact, we teach patients self care behaviors.
We believe that behavior change can be most effectively be achieved by:

Healthy eating: Making healthy food choices, understanding portion sizes and learning the best times to eat are central to managing diabetes. We assist people with diabetes to gain knowledge about the effect of food on blood glucose, sources of carbohydrates and fat, appropriate meal planning and resources to assist in making food choices.

Being Active: Regular activity is important for overall fitness, weight management and blood glucose control. With appropriate levels of exercise, those at risk for type 2 diabetes can reduce that risk, and those with diabetes can improve blood glucose control.

Self-monitoring: Blood glucose measurement provides people with diabetes the information they need to assess how food, physical activity and medications affect their blood glucose levels. A grant from Moore Medical Company partly provides equipment and supplies for Kevin’s Community Center patients.

Medication: Kevin’s healthcare team determines which medications the diabetic patient should be taking and helps them understand how the medications work. Effective drug therapy in combination with healthy lifestyle choices, can lower blood glucose levels, reduce the risk for complications of diabetes and produce many other clinical benefits.

Problem Solving: Collaboratively our certified diabetes educator and clinical team work with patients to address barriers to care such as physical, emotional, cognitive, and financial obstacles and develop coping strategies.

Risk Reduction: Effective risk reduction behaviors such as smoking cessation, and regular eye, foot and dental examinations reduce diabetes complications and maximize health and quality of life. We provide preventive care services such as eye and foot care through generous providers in our community who volunteer their services.

Healthy Coping Health status and quality of life are affected by psychological and social factors. Lack of health care insurance and poverty directly affect health and indirectly influence a person’s motivation to keep their diabetes in control. Coping becomes difficult and a person’s ability to self-manage their diabetes deteriorates. An important part of our work is to provide support and encouragement to talk about concerns and fears and to help our patients learn what they can control and offer ways for them to cope with what they cannot.

Kevin’s Community Center diabetes team consists of primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, social workers, clinic director and a certified diabetes educator.

Paintings used with permission of Artist Lisa Cascone

View a short video about KCC
Special recognition to "Studio Tibi" for donated video production services.