Self-Management in Patients with Diabetes Mellitus for Effectively Controlling Blood Sugar: a Qualitative Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe self-management for controlling blood sugar in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). All participants were able to maintain their HbA1c under 7 for at least 1 year prior to the study. Eighteen patients with type 2 DM participated in this study. Data were collected by using in-depth interviews from August 15, 2011 to December 6, 2011. Each interview lasted 30 minutes for each subject. In-depth interviews allowed the subjects to express a wide variety of ideas, views, and experiences regarding diabetes self-management. The method of content analysis was used to study the collected data. Results showed the self-management strategies used by the type 2 DM patients’ consisted of 7 categories as follows: (1) changing behavior from high to low calorie diet, (2) increasing physical activity, (3) coping with stress, (4) keeping physician’s appointments, (5) taking medicine regularly, (6) having self-regulation, and (7) receiving social support from family and others.

Keywords: