Planning the Management of Your Diabetes

Featuring Dr. Daniel Ngui, BSc (P.T), MD, CFPC, FCFP

Duration: 3 minutes, 16 seconds

Diabetes care in the family physician's office is the best place to start.

First and foremost the most important thing is for a patient to seek to develop a positive, strong, long-term relationship with a long-term physician, with a single physician who's most responsible for the continuous care of that patient.

So the goal of having a single physician is to develop a lifetime of advice and of assessment at the family physician's office. So setting aside proactive planned care for diabetics can really ensure success for the future.

There are two important questions that patients can ask when seeing their family doctor about their diabetic care. Number one is doctor, how am I doing with regards to my diabetic care and what can I be doing to minimize complications from diabetes?

The second is am I up to date with all my tests and my medications that would really help me prevent from developing problems for the future?

So family physicians follow guidelines for the prevention, treatment, management and assessment of diabetes, and the goal of diabetic care is to reduce the risk of cardiovascular metabolic disease and heart disease.

What we try to achieve as family physicians with diabetics is to really focus in on self management of lifestyle modification and diet modification. We often use specific medications such as oral hypoglycemics to reduce the blood sugar levels or perhaps blood pressure pills to ensure that there's protection for the heart and kidney.

Also what we try to do as family physicians is make sure that cholesterol levels and that there are screening tests for kidneys that are done on an annual basis.

Our response is to educate patients about the necessity for eye examinations on a regular basis as well as foot exams, because these are the common complications of diabetes. So your family physician would meet with you on a regular basis to review certain items.

The first thing would be to meet on a regular basis to talk about blood pressure control and ideally a blood pressure control of under 100 and 30 on 80 is an ideal number to minimize complications. The second thing that doctors will want to do is look at what the cholesterol levels are to minimize the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Thirdly glycemic control or average blood sugar control, commonly known as a hemoglobin A1c, is an ideal target to focus on with you and your family doctor. In terms of referrals family doctors will use a whole host of professionals, from dietitians to nurse practitioners, advanced care nurses but two other team members are an opthalmologist for regular annual diabetes eye exams, as well as a podiatrist who will carefully review proper foot care and to rule out the risk of diabetic ulcers.

This patient educational video is for informational purposes only. Each patient has unique needs and unique concerns so it's very important that you seek help from your family physician or healthcare provider to review your own problems and issues.

Presenter: Dr. Daniel Ngui, Family Doctor, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Family Doctor