Pharmacist-led diabetes disease management: She felt so empowered!

Sandra Leal’s story:

[Sandra and her clinic won the Pinnacle Award last month from the American Pharmacists Association for her clinical pharmacist-led diabetes disease management program.]

My patient Maria is an older woman on Medicare.  I started seeing her in May.  Her a1C [blood sugar level] three months ago was 15.9% – that’s ridiculous!  That’s twice as high as she should be.  She’s not on insulin.  We sat and I talked with her about my concerns, that she was not taking her meds, and didn’t want to take insulin, though that was exactly what she needed.

She was resistant to it, so I wanted her to work on her lifestyle.  She told me a lot about her personal history. She uses a cane since she was injured earlier in life, so it’s hard for her to exercise. 

We compromised, so that she wouldn’t start insulin that day, but the medications she was prescribed, she would take them every day.  We agreed that if her condition improved, she wouldn’t have to consider insulin.  She was medication naïve; she had been prescribed a regimen she wasn’t taking at all.  She had four or five other meds, which she was only taking sporadically, not on a consistent basis.

She felt very empowered after we talked, and did some major life change.  She stopped eating a lot of processed foods, started taking her medications, eating whole foods, and logging her readings.  She said she’d try to go to a dance class.

Yesterday she came back after I’d been calling her for three months.  We did an a1C test here in the clinic, with a point of care test, and her level was down to 7.4, which is amazing!  It improved more than half in that three-month period.  She felt so empowered!  Now our goal is to maintain this level of control. 

   

Read another story about changing habits related to diabetes.

Thanks to Sandra Leal, PharmD, MPH, FAPhA, CDE of El Rio Community Health Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center in Arizona, for sharing her story.  Sandra is the Medical Director of Clinical Pharmacists.  “Maria” is a pseudonym.