Diabetics are one patient group with whom we’ve had exceptional success. We are very meticulous about getting them on board to be involved in their own health care, to keep their disease controlled and to prevent or shorten their experience of complications.
When someone is a diabetic, they can use a test that monitors what their average blood sugar has been in the last three months. We routinely get this test done on our patients.
It’s a graph, and we use it to show a diabetic patient their process of maintaining their blood sugar. We draw a line across it to show them where a target level, their goal, should be.
There are more potential side effects to diabetes than with any other chronic disease process, because it can effect every single body system.
It can negatively effect eyesight. It raises the risk for kidney disease and for cardiovascular disease.
So when our patient and medical team work together to get diabetes under control, we’re accomplishing a huge feat, especially when it’s probably never been in control in the patient’s whole life. We get people who have never had good awareness and management of their diabetes.
When we work hard and spend many hours with our diabetic patients, investing a lot of time with education and accountability, and get their disease under good control, the ripple effect of that is just astounding. It affects the patient’s whole life for the better, and saves many thousands of health care dollars.
If you keep one patient off of dialysis, one no-pay patient that health care dollars are going to have to pay for, that’s a savings of thousands and thousands of dollars for one hospital, in one town.
We have hundreds of diabetics at Green Country Free Clinic, and we work with them on a daily basis to get them engaged, accountable and in charge of managing their disease.
When it works, it’s a triumph — both for our patients and us as caregivers.