Only seven per cent of the 79 million people in the US with pre-diabetes know they have it Albright adds: “Of the 79 million
people in the US who have pre-diabetes, only 7 per cent know it. At the CDC, we’ve therefore been conducting focus groups with people who fall along the continuum of risk, to try and understand what the messaging needs to be – what do we need to say to make people realise their risk and take action?” “Ideally there’d be a national pre-
diabetes awareness campaign, targeting consumers and funded by government,” says Lever. “Individual programme deliverers will never have that sort of spending power.”
persuading the physicians Lever continues: “However, the huge gap in education is present not only among the general public but among the clinical physician community too – a lack of knowledge regarding what to do with patients who have pre-diabetes. We’re doing some work with the American Academy of Family Physicians to figure out what it will take to get doctors to refer people into the programme. “One lady who attended the YMCA’s
Diabetes Prevention Programme had recently visited her doctor and received her lab results in the post. Her blood glucose level was circled, but there were no comments, nothing, so she ignored it. A couple of weeks later, as a part of her employer’s efforts to encourage people to participate in our programme, she
april 2012 © cybertrek 2012
received some information which said that, if you have a blood glucose level in this certain range, you have pre-diabetes, which means you’re on a dangerous path to developing diabetes. She pulled out the results from her doctor, realised she was in that range and independently enrolled in the programme. But why didn’t her doctor alert her? “Ultimately we’re still in the infancy of
the programme. The YMCAs need to reach out more to their local doctors, winning them over one at a time and generating good old-fashioned word- of-mouth. This is going to take decades, not years, to fully realise its potential.”
fast-forward So where is the YMCA’s programme currently available? “At the end of January 2012, it was available in 26 States, through 48 different YMCAs and at over 200 locations; each YMCA will also deliver the programme at other community venues,” says Lever.
“That number changes almost monthly though, because of the speed at which we’re rolling out.” Albright adds: “The recognition
programme – pillar two of our programme – went live in February 2012, and within the fi rst couple of weeks we had another 33 sites with pending recognition. We do consider this to be a national programme, even though we’re not in every State yet.”
“We’ve already had more than 4,000
people go through the YMCA’s Diabetes Prevention Programme, and our dream is that every YMCA in the country will have it on its schedule,” says Lever. “It’s going to take us a while to get there, because this programme puts us in a slightly different space. We’re now being considered an adjunct healthcare provider, which is new territory for most YMCAs and invokes other issues around privacy protection and so on. We need to take on-board new learnings, adopt new policies. We can’t fl ick a switch and immediately offer the programme at every YMCA in the US. “It’s also a matter of resources –
predominantly funding but also human resources. There’s a lot more training we need to do, people we need to hire, skillsets we need to develop. “However, I believe that if the YMCA,
with 58 per cent of the US population within three miles of a facility; the CDC, the leading public health agency around prevention; and United Healthcare, one of the largest health insurers in the country, as well as other insurers coming on board – if we can’t fi gure this out, there’s no hope for this model of prevention. With that set of players, you have everything you need to pull this off. If it doesn’t work here, it never will.”
healthclub@leisuremedia.com kate cracknell
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