Abstract
Akan and Kartal’s study confirms the need for a lifetime commitment to disease management and health promotion for individuals with diabetes. The healthcare team, with the individual with diabetes, is at the centre of interventions. Healthcare teams should be consistent over time, reviewing the social determinants of all individuals, as a vital part of treatment modalities and options.
The level of client satisfaction with chronic disease care management directly affects the individual’s quality of life. Studies indicate that more people are staying healthier longer, which improves their quality of life and allows them to stay independent longer and avoid disease complications. Measuring quality of life as a client outcome indicator at specific time frames over time allows the healthcare team to provide further assessments and interventions to target further supports their clients.
Clearly, we can be doing more to improve health-related quality of life issues for all people with chronic diseases. To make sure we spend our scarce resources wisely, we must find feasible ways to measure health-related quality of life at specific intervals that correlates results to medical and nursing interventions. It must become a core means of measuring progress on health. Clinicians have helped lead efforts to make these methods more widely considered, initially as outcomes in clinical research, and increasingly as part of all health assessments.
Chronic conditions are often defined as medical conditions or health problems with associated symptoms or disabilities that require long-term management. Chronic illness, such as diabetes mellitus, is multidimensional, requiring interactive interventions with the healthcare team to address not only the physical symptoms but the psychological impact on individuals for a positive outcome. Inherent in the treatment of individuals with diabetes is the evaluation of the social determinants of health-specific treatments. Social determinants such as drug cost, availability of nutritious foods and transportation to health visits are just a few social determinants that affect chronic disease management, which may impact one’s satisfaction with the quality of life they experience. Diabetes is also a psychologically challenging medical condition, with often hidden emotional burdens and worries that the patient experiences when managing diabetes.
There are many health predictors that affect the quality of life, some more obvious than others. Thus, the approach to treating individuals with diabetes must be a holistic framework, focused on health promotion, both supporting and empowering individuals with diabetes. Self-rated quality of life may predict mortality, morbidity and future use of healthcare services. Such information is useful for tracking the perceived burden of chronic diseases or conditions (e.g., diabetes) and their risk factors (e.g., obesity, physical inactivity, tobacco use, alcohol use) among older adults. Population health initiatives may target additional interventions derived from quality-of-life data, such as the need for a low-impact gym in certain areas where elderly clients with diabetes reside. Aggregate data is helpful in planning health promotion initiatives. Data analyses and reports on health risks for entire communities will better delineate existing and projected health disparities, informing health policy needs.
This study identified that a client’s assessment of their chronic illness care directly affects their quality of life. Numerous predictors of quality of life, in addition to disease management, may affect how an individual self-rates their care. The healthcare team needs to focus on the client’s ability for self-management and request supports as needed. The healthcare team needs to focus on specific interventions to assist clients attain increased quality of life measurements, not just merely focus on the disease of diabetes.
The nature of healthcare requires a focus on health promotion, perhaps with incentives for clients. Holistic, positive approaches should become the daily practice combined with knowing who your patient really is, and that takes longer than brief encounters. In other words, find the client burden and address it. This study is on the forefront of healthcare client outcomes that matter.