With over 66,000 persons estimated to be living with diabetes in Guyana, the government is embarking on a series of initiatives aimed at improving the level of care offered to patients.
This was revealed by Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony during a recent episode of “The Guyana Dialogue”.
According to the Minister, the government is steering away from traditional ways of diabetic testing. He noted that the HBA1C is a more reliable marker, and the Ministry is looking to have it introduced at the clinic level across the country.
“One of the challenges that we have is that we still use glucometers and we’ve been using the traditional methods to check whether or not somebody is diabetic. We feel that the HBA1C is a more reliable marker and so one of the things with these new guidelines is that we’ll be benchmarking using HBA1C and we’ve bought a number of these machines that we’re putting in primary healthcare settings. Our objective is to make sure that every health centre would have one of these so when patients come in, we can do their HBA1C at the clinic level…to get a better understanding of what is happening with the patient,” the Minister highlighted.
“HBA1C will give you an estimate of what the sugar levels and blood levels would have been over the last three months versus when you come in and you check with one of these strips, that is just telling you what is going on with you at that moment. So, the HBA1C is much more reliable and that’s why we’re going to shift to using them,” he added.
Anthony also unveiled that the Ministry is currently following a protocol developed by the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) called HEARTS-D which, according to the PAHO website, is a module on the Diagnosis and Management of Type 2 Diabetes based on the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance on the diagnosis, classification, and treatment of diabetes.
“Now we decided that…for those persons who are diabetic, we want to offer them better care. So, one of the projects that we’re working on is to improve care for diabetics. So, once you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes, we want to make sure that we can help you to control your blood sugar and bring it down to normal levels. And to do that we have been, across the public healthcare system, we have changed the medication that we’re offering at each of our clinics. We’re following a protocol that is being developed by the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) called Hearts-D, (D being diabetes). So that’s the protocol we’ve been using and we’re using medication that’s more effective for treating patients,” the Health Minister explained.
He noted too that in addition to this new system, the Ministry in collaboration with Mount Sinai has been working to develop new diabetes guidelines over the last two months.
“You would see us launch those guidelines in July and having completed the launch of the guidelines we’ll be training primary healthcare doctors in the use of the guidelines. So that would also happen in July. And then we’ll be rolling out a very comprehensive programme to get people on this type of treatment,” Anthony added.
Only last year, Dr Anthony had revealed that the estimate was 60,000 persons – many of whom, he said, were unaware of their status. Of that figure, he disclosed that there are about 150 persons suffering specifically from type one diabetes. Type one diabetes, known as insulin-dependent diabetes, is a chronic condition in which the pancreas makes little or no insulin.
Insulin is a hormone the body uses to allow sugar or glucose to enter cells to produce energy.
Reports indicate that Guyana has over 400 health facilities, each of which is equipped to make diagnoses and handle diabetic cases.
