week 3

It's quiet on campus at the moment because students have exams and some also have their semester breaks. I'm still collecting data for my project...This week I have focused more on interviews with diabetes patients which has been pretty fun! I enjoy speaking to the patients....often they have very poor understanding about what diabetes actually is so it feels good to be able to conduct a bit of education on the side......I'm interviewing them with a standard questionnaire that I've developed to assess their attitudes towards medications and their compliance....So far I've noticed that if patients are on twice daily dosing they will often forget the second daily dose, a big problem!

I visited the National Centre for Health Promotion today, which is in Tamavua (about 10 minutes drive from Suva city). There are 7 staff there and although previously their role was to produce educational material (leaflets etc) to create awareness of health issues, they are now more active in behavioural interventions, targeting specific age groups to bring about better health outcomes. In terms of diabetes, they are targeting primary school and high school children to tackle obesity, one the of the big risk factors for diabetes....They are promoting physical exercise, healthy food and having regular medical check ups....They mentioned how even children between class 1 and 8 have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes which is a bit of a shock!