Gestational Diabetes Testing, Narrative, and Medical Distrust (original) (raw)

Gomersall, T., Madill, A., Summers, L.K. (2012) Getting one's thoughts straight: A dialogical analysis of women's accounts of poorly controlled type 2 diabetes.

Psychology & Health, 27, 378-393., 2012

Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder characterised by chronically elevated blood glucose and a high risk of cardiovascular and other complications. Self-management is central to diabetes care and includes taking regular exercise, low-fat/sugar diet and blood glucose monitoring. However, little is understood about how people with diabetes make sense of self-management. Our aim, therefore, is to explore the process of ‘getting one's thoughts straight’ in relation to illness self-management for women with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes. Eight women were recruited from two hospitals in the North of England. Each was interviewed using a biographic-narrative method. Narratives were analysed using a dialogical approach. We use Bakhtin's concepts of voice, official and unofficial truth, and internally persuasive discourse to explore how participants considered, struggled with, and, sometimes, acted upon self-management. We demonstrate how the truth by which participants lived shifted as they encountered new perspectives and experiences. The accounts revealed tension between official, authoritative voices, typically concerned with optimal illness control and unofficial voices that speak at a lived, embodied level. In conclusion, we suggest moving beyond the notion of self-management towards a conceptualisation of life with chronic illness that includes personal goals, values and embodied experience in context.

Engaging Patients and Clinicians in Establishing Research Priorities for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus

Canadian journal of diabetes, 2016

We involved patients and clinicians in Alberta, Canada, to establish research priorities in gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), using an approach based on a model proposed by the James Lind Alliance (JLA). We adapted the 4-step JLA process to engage women with GDM and clinicians to identify uncertainties about the management of GDM. Uncertainties were identified through a survey and a review of the clinical practice guidelines (CPG). Uncertainties were short-listed by a steering committee, followed by a 1-day facilitated workshop using a nominal group format and involving a similar number of patients and clinicians, who identified the top 10 research priorities. Across the various survey formats, 75 individuals submitted 389 uncertainties, the majority (44; 59%) coming from patients. We removed 9 questions as being out of scope or unclear, and 41 were identified on a review of CPG, resulting in a total of 421 uncertainties. After the priority setting process, the final top 10 resea...

Diagnosis of gestational diabetes: a 'teachable moment

Diabetic medicine : a journal of the British Diabetic Association, 2018

Research regarding the determinants of concordance with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) treatment is limited. Here, we test whether the psychosocial changes outlined in the teachable moments model, as proposed by McBride et al. (McBride CM, Emmons KM, Lipkus IM. Understanding the potential of teachable moments: the case of smoking cessation. Health Educ Res 2003; 18: 156-170) are associated with following GDM treatment recommendations. Fifty-nine women completed a baseline questionnaire (1 week after GDM diagnosis) in which they reported risk perception, social support, emotional response, the importance of their maternal identity and self-efficacy. One month later, participants reported their concordance with instructions regarding glucose monitoring, diet and, if applicable, medication. We used regression analysis to test for associations between the psychosocial factors measured at baseline and concordance at 1-month follow-up. Those who perceived their risk as higher or felt...

Standards and stories: the interactional work of informed choice in Ontario midwifery care

Healthcare policy = Politiques de santé, 2013

This paper uses a discourse-rhetorical approach to analyze how Ontario midwives and their clients interactionally accomplish the healthcare communicative process of "informed choice." Working with four excerpts from recorded visits between Ontario midwives and women, the analysis focuses on the discursive rendering during informed choice conversations of two contrasting kinds of evidence - professional standards and story-telling - related to potential interventions during labour. We draw on the concepts of discursive hybridity (Sarangi and Roberts 1999) and recontextualization (Linell 1998; Sarangi 1998) to trace the complex and creative ways in which the conversational participants reconstruct the meanings of these evidentiary sources to address their particular care contexts. This analysis shows how, though very different in their forms, both modes of evidence function as hybrid and flexible discursive resources that perform both instrumental and social-relational healt...