Introduction & Objective: Psychosocial care should be provided to all people with diabetes. Psychosocial problems can impair a person’s ability to carry out diabetes self-care. Thus, addressing these problems is critical to improve outcomes. To better understand medical students’ awareness of psychosocial problems, we created a mock behavioral diabetes case for evaluation.
Methods: We conducted a descriptive, cross-sectional study with medical students of all four years at a school in the Midwest. Students were asked to provide a written description of a case of a 67-year-old man with type 2 diabetes. All students were provided laboratory results (HbA1c=9.8%), family history, and comments from the man. The comments noted that he recently retired from his job and moved to a new city. He referred to his diabetes as very hard, and he felt there was nothing he could do to make it better. The case concluded with the man saying he felt he should no longer bother with his diabetes because it would only get worse. We analyzed all written case summaries using content analysis in NVivo software.
Results: A total of 248 medical students participated (mean age=25.0±2.4 years, 65.1% women, 69.8% White, 6.3% Black, 16.4% Asian, 28.2% third-year students). Of the 248 students, 144 (58.1%) noted in their description a potential behavioral health concern, such as depression, anxiety, distress, and/or burnout. Interestingly, only one participant wrote about diabetes distress, despite this topic being taught in the curriculum, and only three participants noted his recent move and retirement. Conversely, 112 participants focused their descriptions on HbA1c, of which 90 referred to it as poorly controlled or uncontrolled diabetes.
Conclusion: Findings showed half of participating medical students recognized a potential psychosocial problem in the case. However, a third of participants used stigmatizing language to describe glycemic targets. More research at other medical schools is needed to confirm these findings.
L. Wisniewski: None. E.A. Beverly: None.
