Syed Wasif Gillani, Syed Azhar Syed Sulaiman, Mirza Baig, Yelly Oktavia Sari, Siti Maisharah Sheikh Ghadzi, Sabariah Noor Haroon and Nur Hafzan Md Hanafiah
Our study objective was to evaluate the pharmacist interventions in providing patient home care. A 24-week longitudinal quasi-experimental-pre-test/post-test study design was used to assess the effectiveness of a diabetes education program to enhance self-care practices. Since this was a longitudinal study a 25% attrition rate was included in the calculation of sample size. Hence the sample size for the proposed study was 106 subjects with 53 subjects in each group. All analyses were done using SPSS version 18®. The level of significance was set at 0.05. The Research Ethics Committee of hospital and the Malaysian Medical Research and Ethics Committee approved the study. Of the 109 subjects who met the study-entry criteria, 3 subjects declined to participate due to lack of time and interest. There was no significant relationship between the demographic and clinical characteristic of participants who completed the study. During follow-up there was a statistically significant difference in Self Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) practices between the intervention group (M=2.94, SD=2.25) and control group (M=0.47, SD=1.36; t(127.64)=-8.23, p ≤ 0.001) with moderate effect size (eta squared=0.06). Total physical activity was defined as the combination of non-leisure and leisure activities. There was a statistically significant difference in total physical levels between the intervention (M=14.01, SD=6.41) and control groups (13.21, SD=5.22; t(148.04)=-3.15, p=0.002) with no difference in the non-leisure activity (p=0.43). As for the control group, there was no significant difference in SMBG practices from baseline (M=0.70, SD=1.35) to follow-up (M= 0.47, SD=1.36, t(72)=0.97, P=0.34) and no relationship was found between the number of blood glucose tests done with demographic or clinical variables. Improvement of self-care practices that require lifestyle changes such as diet and increased in physical activities are problematic. This could be due to the complexity of these self-care practices that are socially and culturally constructed and often lifetime habits when compared to SMBG.