Can having ‘virtual diabetes’ teach doctors anything?

When you attend for a consultation for your diabetes, do you ever feel it would help if the health professional also had diabetes? Or if you’re a health professional, what do you say when you are asked “do you have diabetes?” or someone says “it’s alright for you, you don’t have to live with it every day like I do?”

A study presented at a recent meeting of diabetes specialist doctors told of 10 trainee specialists being asked to live with Type 1 diabetes for a week, incorporating it into their usual lives. Their ‘diabetes life’ involved giving mock injections, taking regular blood glucose measurements, recording how much carbohydrate they ate and being prepared for hypos. 

How did they get on? Perhaps not surprisingly, they forgot some tests and injections during the week, many did not record carbs and half of them did not carry a hypo kit. Most found injections and tests and the routine harder than they expected. So far, so normal – what a relief! Importantly, 9 of the 10 doctors said that their attitude in their clinics had changed as a result of taking part in this experiment.

Sadly, the short report did not reveal exactly how they had changed their practice (we are trying to find out), but we could perhaps guess that it was to have a lot more understanding of the demands of living with diabetes and the realisation that it is not easy to do boring, repetitive tasks every day on top of everything else.

Having more understanding is certain to be really helpful in making conversations in consultations more shared and realistic. We only hope that the 10^th doctor in the survey - who said their attitude had not changed - already understood what having diabetes meant – or perhaps even had it themselves!

There are plenty of health professionals who do have diabetes or live with it in some way, for example having partners, children or other family members with it. For many, it is the reason they specialised in diabetes in the first place. In our experience, health professionals have different attitudes to revealing their diabetes. Some seem to expect everyone to do what they do; some find it stressful, feel that they have to act as an example and may be judged on how they are managing their own diabetes; others choose not to tell anyone, to avoid their diabetes becoming the focus of the consultation rather than the person they are seeing. In short, just like anyone with diabetes, they cope with it in different ways and make choices about how much to incorporate it into their working lives.

Reaching a shared understanding in a consultation of what’s important to someone with diabetes plays a crucial role in creating a useful plan of action and making attending worthwhile. The lived experience of what it takes to really put instructions into practice is a welcome step towards this. The authors of the report recommend that it should be incorporated into specialist training for doctors. We wonder why this should not be the case for ALL diabetes specialist staff?

Tell us what you think – do health professionals ‘get it’ better if they have diabetes or experienced living with it like these doctors? Should 'virtual' diabetes be an essential part of training for people working in the field of diabetes?  the floor is open for your comments!

Reference:

Pokrajac, A. et al (2011). Insight into life with diabetes mellitus improves consultation skills in diabetes trainees: Association of British Clinical Diabetologists Spring Meeting 2011 Abstracts. Practical Diabetes, 28, 8, 362.