Family physicians clinical aptitude for the nutritional management of type 2 diabetes mellitus in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Abstract

There are 180,000 new Diabetes Mellitus cases in Mexico each year (1). This chronic, complex and multifactor disease requires an adequate nutritional management plan to be prescribed by family physicians. They should be trained to identify the potential difficulties in the patient's dietary schedule and orientate their management from an integrative point of view. The purpose of this study was to detect and measure family physician's clinical aptitudes for the nutritional management of Type 2 diabetes, in a representative family physician's sample from five Family Medicine Units of the Mexican Institute of Social Security in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. A structured and validated instrument was applied to 117 physicians from a total of 450 in Guadalajara, Jalisco. The main study variable was clinical aptitude for nutritional management of Type 2 diabetes. Aptitude levels were defined by an ordinal scale and related to the other variables using the median, Mann-Whitney's U test and Kruskal Wallis (KW) test. Global results showed a median of 30 points that relates to a low and a very low aptitude level for the 72% of physicians without statistical significance (KW: p>0.05) with the rest of variables. These results reflect family physician's difficulties to orientate the nutritional management of Type 2 diabetes, as well as the lack of work environments that facilitate case reflection and formative educational strategies.