Abstract
Introduction:The diabetes mellitus-periodontitis relationship has advocated several strategic management approaches on effective glycaemic control and oral health improvement for diabetic patients and periodontitis patients with diabetes. We aimed to identify the challenges of providing health education to patients with diabetes and/or periodontitis among healthcare professionals and needs for an integrated nutrition-oral health education module.Methods:This study involved semi-structure in-depth interview with fifteen healthcare professionals from a training hospital focused on: (i) the existing issues and challenges encountered while managing patients for their nutrition and care and (ii) issues related to the current practice among healthcare professionals. Details pertaining to the participants’ verbal and non-verbal responses were recorded, transcribed ad verbatim and analysed using themes codes.Results:Patients’ attitude and behaviour, language barriers and prioritising time were found as the common problems with patients, while limited knowledge on the relationship between diabetes-periodontitis, limited availability of appropriate and cultural-based health educational tools, lack of inter-professional multidisciplinary collaboration in managing patients, and constrains in time as well as costly therapy were common issues in the current practice.Conclusions:Cost-effective efforts must be focused on overcoming these issues besides emphasizing the needs on developing an integrated module to achieve better management outcomes.
Highlights
The diabetes mellitus-periodontitis relationship has advocated several strategic management approaches on effective glycaemic control and oral health improvement for diabetic patients and periodontitis patients with diabetes
The bidirectional relationship between type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and periodontitis has established that is periodontitis is a complication of diabetes mellitus [1] and periodontitis severity is worsened by diabetes [2], improvement of glycaemic status and control of periodontitis progression via dental treatment and oral health improvement provide beneficial clinical outcomes of both diseases [3, 4, 5]
It is acknowledged that awareness of periodontitis and interactions between diabetes and periodontitis is relatively low among diabetic patients [18, 19], while many still perceive that dental check-ups are not important [20,21,22]
Summary
The diabetes mellitus-periodontitis relationship has advocated several strategic management approaches on effective glycaemic control and oral health improvement for diabetic patients and periodontitis patients with diabetes. Studies have shown that the risk of diabetes complications can be minimized if glycaemic control is maintained within the normal range (3.9–7.2 mmol/l) [13] by disseminating knowledge related to self-care to patients, as well as professional intervention via periodic supportive treatment [4, 12, 14,15,16] This fundamental breakthrough has advocated several recommendations by both endocrinologists and periodontists for concurrent glycaemic control and oral health education with professional dental care as the combined strategic approach for managing the disease [4, 12, 17]. The existing medical and health education show limited input on oral health education through the training of future healthcare professionals [23, 24], efforts have been made to incorporate oral health education into the allied health sciences curriculum and some multidisciplinary collaborative teams [25,26,27]
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