VIDEO: Keeping patients engaged in their diabetes treatment plan

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My opinion is that this is not my condition, this is their condition. So they're going to decide what they want to do with their condition. Again, my job is to offer tools and resources and support. I don't know about you, but any goal I've ever had that is chronic and requires me to do something every day, I'm gonna have setbacks. It just is normal. You know, I actually used the example that I had an infection not long ago and I had an antibiotic I had to take twice a day. I only had to do it for a week, but I missed some doses because again, I had to change my regimen. So rather than beating myself up around it, I just say, "Okay, look, I'm human. These are things that happen. What can I do if it's a chronic thing? What can I do to make it easier?"

So I often talk to my patients about, you know, is this regimen working for you? Are there any barriers that make it hard for you to work? Is there anything I can do? I have plenty of patients who have setbacks. Sometimes they have big setbacks, they'll disappear for a year. And rather than berate them, I might say, okay, so it looks like you had a diabetes holiday. And, you know, can we work together to kind of bring the things back into kind of the plan? And I think by doing that and recognizing the work, right, because 90% of diabetes management is self-management, I think that that makes it easier. I also think that there should be many touch points. I can't do all of that work with my patients with diabetes by myself.

I have a team, I work with a pharmacist, I work with educators, I work with community health workers. And those many touch points not only are good for information on our side, but actually get information for the patient. So like if a patient goes out to eat and is not sure what would be safe to eat, I'm not right there with them. But if they have touch points with lots of our team members, they could say, "Hey, I went to this place. What would you recommend?" Or, you know, "How do I handle this situation?" And so I think those things allow the patient to get meaningful information in a timely way. Because if I see them pretty soon, every three months, they're gonna forget the thousand questions they had along the way. And so I think this is another way to keep our patients engaged in their treatment plan, but ultimately we recognize it's their plan that we just help them to create.