2009 Faculty Researchers

Robin L. Kruse, PhD

Self-care goals of adult patients with diabetes: How do providers interact with patients about them?

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Department

Family and Community Medicine

Office Location

MA306 Medical Sciences Building

Phone #:

Office: (573) 882-5611
Fax: (573) 884-6172

Summary

Diabetes is a common chronic illness that disproportionately affects older adults. Severe complications can occur, including amputation, kidney failure, blindness, and stroke. Controlling blood sugar, lipids, and blood pressure can reduce the risk of these complications, but requires considerable effort from patients. We have a poor understanding of how patients with diabetes and providers interact to promote setting and achieving self-management goals.

We are conducting a cross-sectional, mixed-methods study, employing observations and interviews to address this information gap. We will determine how patients interact with physicians and nurses in five primary care practices in central Missouri to determine how (and whether) self-care goals are set, and to determine barriers and facilitators to setting self-care goals in the clinical setting. Research questions and analysis will focus on how often self-care goals are mentioned, who brings them up, the content of the goal-setting conversation, whether encouragement was offered, and documentation of care plans. The student researcher will obtain informed consent from patients, record patient-provider encounters, interview providers, and enter transcribed interviews into qualitative analysis software for coding and text retrieval. The student researcher will also have the opportunity to participate in qualitative analysis of the data with our multidisciplinary research team.