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VIDEO: Cultural awareness provides opportunities for better care in gestational diabetes
SAN DIEGO — In this video exclusive, Harsimran Singh, PhD, a health psychologist and a clinical research scientist at the Mary & Dick Allen Diabetes Center at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, California, discusses how gestational diabetes differentially affects various ethnic groups.
“We are trained to lump all women with GDM together as a patient population, and I think we have missed opportunities to be proactive in our care for these patients,” Singh said.
For example, she and her colleagues found that a cohort of Hispanic women with GDM were more likely than white or Asian women to have a caesarean section and had more ER visits during pregnancy. Asian Indian women were different from Chinese women in terms of how they understood and addressed GDM as well as their outcomes.
“As researchers, just to have a stronger data set, we are prone to put together all Asian groups,” Singh said. “This is where we miss opportunities for care and we don’t get the outcomes we are expecting.”