Discussions of self-management and self-management education during GP consultations with patients with type 2 diabetes

For people living with long term conditions such as diabetes, the majority of care takes place outside of the healthcare setting, with a much smaller amount of care and support coming from health care professionals such as GPs and nurses. Managing a long-term condition on a daily basis is called self-management. Education to support patients self-manage has been found to be beneficial in improving health and wellbeing. For people with diabetes, attendance at education like this is recommended, however, research shows that only a small percentage of patients actually attend. There is some research to suggest that the way that education is discussed and promoted by health professionals is important in patients attending. Not much is known about what health professionals think about self-management education, and less is known about how they actually discuss it, and self-management more generally, with their patients. We will look at video recorded GP appointments with patients to see if and how issues of self-management and self-management education are brought up and discussed. We will access two databases of videos that were created for research purposes. The first contains 327 taped (307 video, 20 audio-only) GP appointments from the Bristol area. The second contains 281 video recorded consultations from the London area. We will focus on videos of patients with, or at risk of developing, diabetes and look for conversations about self-management. We will analyse these videos using a technique called conversation analysis that will allow us to see patterns in the conversations. We hope to learn how conversations around self-management take place, how GPs talk about self-management and self-management education, and how patients respond to these conversations. This will be important in helping GPs understand the best way to discuss self-management with patients to increase use of self-management resources.

Amount awarded: £29 932