We Are AMCEC
A leading and trusted diabetes and Cardiovascular counseling agency known for excellent service and expert support.
Today, you have taken another step on your journey towards better health and well-being.
For Thos Who Value Self-Management and Support
Diabetes Counseling and Self-Management Programme is your opportunity to have all your questions and concerns answered virtually. Your diabetes educator would work with you in charting a path through or around your challenges that will remove most of the gloom surrounding diabetes management, making you feel confident about your chances of overcoming this condition and living the healthy, full life you deserve.
For Those Who Are Willing To Benefit From Our Heart-Health Tips
We also work towards helping you learn how to prevent reaching to the point of heart attack or stroke, by helping you to identify the warning signs beforehand, like high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, and smoking. We help you to learn to manage these precursors to heart attack and stroke and in the process prevent or minimize your chance of having any of them.
For Those Who Want to Make wise and healthy choices for a better quality of life
Our healthy lifestyle education also helps persons who have non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, high blood pressure, and other cardiovascular diseases to make the right choices that will prevent complications and keep these conditions well managed.
And persons who are also at risk for NCDs can benefit from lifestyle counseling to prevent or minimize their chances of having NCDs
For Those Who Deserve Excellent Customer Support and Service
We will work with you by first listening to you, then using that information to help you to craft a plan that will guide you through the steps to recovery which include diet, exercises that are suitable for your condition, ensuring that you learn how to take your medication to get the best out of it, and helping you to learn to cope with the challenges associated with your condition.
Meet the TEAM
Desmond Croker RN, Dip. OHS, BSN MSN CCDE (CEO)
Desmond Croker is a Registered Nurse and Caribbean Certified Diabetes Educator (CCDE) He also holds a Master’s degree in Advanced nursing from the University of the West Indies focusing on Education. He hails from the beautiful country Guyana (Land of many waters) and is the founder and CEO of Annie’s Memorial Chronic Disease Education Centre (AMCEC) and has worked with persons around the Caribbean including Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the Turks and Caicos Islands to help them to better understand self-management of diabetes and hypertension.
Patroy Montaque (Partner Business Development)
Marketing & Product development & Packaging. (BSc in Business Administration, MSc in Educational Administration, Post Graduate Diploma- Education & Training & EdD Candidate-Leadership in Higher Education
Business & Education Lecturer for 15 years.
John Odoemenem (IT Support)
John Is a critical care nurse, with over 3 years of experience. He is Deeply committed to Knowledge, expertise, and achievement in areas including; Health informatics, Data Science, and Artificial intelligence. He is a seasoned Web designer and Digital marketer.
our work inspires smiles
Annette Young
Bernadette Millington
Victoria John
Roxanne Ali
David Singh
We have great answers to all the questions our clients have to ask
AMCEC And DSMES
Diabetes self-management education is necessary upon diagnosis of diabetes, whenever there is a change in treatment plan, whenever there is a crisis, for example, uncontrolled blood sugar and as an annual assessment
The service at AMCEC is personalized to meet the needs of each client. Therefore, if you have diabetes, diabetes self-management education will help you to better understand what you need to do to live a healthy lifestyle in spite of your circumstances.
Each lifestyle coaching session may be different depending on the goals and needs of the person. At first, we’ll assess your risks and immediate needs and prioritize them, set goals, then we will lay out a plan on how we will go about addressing those goals.
Occasionally you will also be given assignments to help you direct your progress. We’ll work together to discover what obstacles are in your way and figure out how to overcome them. With each session, we’ll revisit your goals and see what steps are needed to achieve them.
There is a scarcity of information given in the healthcare system. Persons with diabetes are not given enough information to help them to make the decisions that they would have to make every moment of their life. Diabetes self-management education will give you the opportunity to ask all the questions and have them answered and express all the concerns that you have with the treatment and have these explained to you in terms that you can understand.
Persons needing diabetes self-management include; persons with prediabetes, those who were recently diagnosed as having diabetes, persons having challenges managing blood sugar esp. those taking medication and not able to reach their goal. Persons making a change in treatment like moving from oral medication to insulin.
A diabetes educator is a health professional who has had additional training in the management of diabetes. With a diabetes educator you will have full support and counselling in understanding how and when to exercise, foods to eat and those to avoid, how to take your medication to get the best from them and understanding how to manage stress in your life.
Yes! there will be a certificate offered to clients successfully completed the diabetes self-management programme and gain full independence to manage their condition.
Diabetes Care
There are a number of risk factors related to diabetes. These include:
- Ethnicity: Africans, Asians, Middle Eastern and Hispanic
- Age: just reaching the age of 40 put you at risk for diabetes
- Inactivity: being active less than 3 times a week
- Being overweight or obese
- Having a mother, father, brother or sister with diabetes
- A woman giving birth to a child over 9 pounds
- A woman with gestational diabetes
- Stress is a major contributor to the onset of diabetes
- Insulin resistance
- Being diagnosed with polycystic ovaries
- Acantosis nigricans
- Metabolic syndrome
Symptoms associated with diabetes include:
- Frequent urination
- Excessive thirst
- Tiredness
- Hunger
- Blurred vision
- Burning or tingling in the feet
- Unexplained weight loss
- Wounds that take long to heal
Tingling sensation in hands and feet.
Please note that absence of these symptoms does not mean that you do not have diabetes
Complications associated with chronic diseases are wide and varied and include;
Heart diseases, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, amputations, blood circulation problems, wounds that won’t heal, high blood pressure, diabetes, liver failure, just to name a few.
You can prevent these complications by learning things you need to do to live a healthy lifestyle.
To know if you have diabetes you must be diagnosed as such by a doctor. However, if you are recognizing any of the symptoms of diabetes and have not yet been diagnosed you can take a random blood sugar test. If the result is over 200mg/dl or 11.1mmol/L it is quite likely you have diabetes. This however must be confirmed by a doctor.
Yes it is! But on condition that you have made the decision to make changes to your lifestyle. This, however, must be a process that we can work together on to achieving that goal.