Perspectives and Experiences of Health Care Professionals and Patients with Diabetes regarding Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: To explore the current perspectives and experiences of Canadian health care professionals and patients with diabetes regarding self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG). Design: Qualitative analysis of focus groups in Ottawa, Vancouver and Edmonton. Methods: Seventeen focus groups involving 59 health care professionals (19 pharmacists, 18 certified diabetes educators and 22 physicians) and 40 patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes were held, using separate moderator's guides. Thematic analysis was used to analyze responses. Results: Health care professionals reported recommending SMBG to most patients with diabetes, regardless of insulin use. They also reported periodically reviewing glucometer results, providing education on interpreting the results and proper use of SMBG devices. The majority of patients with diabetes indicated that they regularly monitored their blood glucose levels and recorded their results. Advantages of SMBG cited by health care professionals included a sense of control over diabetes, the ability to make lifestyle and treatment choices and increased patient confidence. Patients listed expense, discomfort and inconvenience as disadvantages to SMBG. Although patients discussed SMBG readings with their health care professionals, many reported that treating physicians were often uninterested in SMBG results. Physicians tended to refer to SMBG in the context of disease-specific benefits, while certified diabetes educators more often cited the psychological and educational benefits of SMBG. Compared with physicians, pharmacists focused more on the lifestyle and educational benefits of SMBG rather than on changes to medications. Conclusion: SMBG is commonly recommended by health care professionals and regularly performed by most patients with diabetes. Pharmacists and other health care professionals play an important role in educating patients on the appropriate use of SMBG and interpretation of results. To ensure optimal use, pharmacists and other health care providers should review the desired outcomes of SMBG with patients on a regular basis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".