The effect of following up with telephone and education on metabolic control and self-care among patiends with diabetes mellitus

The major target specified for controlling diabetes is that patients are able to handle disease management by themselves and one of the ways to achieve this target is regular telephone follow-up of patients. It is reported that telephone follow-up is a method that enables patients to receive services at their homes, enables monitoring of them with respect to their compliance with healthcare training and allows determining on what issues they need training so that an appropriate healthcare training can be provided. In order to investigate the effect of telephone follow-up of diabetic patients on their self-care and metabolic control, this semi-experimental research was carried out with 88 diabetic patients, 44 being in the intervention group and 44 in the control group, who presented to Kecioren Training and Research Hospital between 31 October 2011 and 20 March 2012. Before starting the research, written permissions were obtained from the institution where the research was to be performed and from the ethics committee and verbal permissions from the patients. The data were collected using a patient information form containing sociodemographic characteristics, the Diabetes Self-Care Scale and a metabolic control variables form. The Diabetes Self-Care Scale scores range between 140 and 210 and as the scale score increases, self-care activities of patients also increase. At the end of the study, it was found that the self-care score of the intervention group increased to 89.9±12.3 after telephone follow-up (p<0.005) from its pre-follow-up self-care score of 61.3±10.9 whereas the score was 56.5±7.6 in the control group before the three-month period and it declined to 54.7±9.3 after it. Telephone follow-up also decreased the values of the metabolic control variables including HbA1c, total cholesterol, triglyceride, LDL cholesterol, and systolic blood pressure. Finally, it was concluded that telephone follow-up of diabetic patients increased their self-care scores and improved their metabolic control variables. In view of these results, it can be suggested that patients should be regularly followed up by telephone in a way to ensure the continuity of the self-care behaviors they have acquired.Key words: Diabetes mellitus, self-care, telephone follow-up, metabolic variables.