Active screening for diabetic foot — assessment of health care professionals’ compliance to it

Abstract

Background. The strategy of care for chronic diabetic complications prevention includes appropriate organization and education of healthcare professionals. Despite the availability of skilled medical staff, there is insufficient information about the feet examination in standard practice. We evaluated the personnel’s compliance in the context of following the guidelines for foot examination.
Materials and methods. We retrospectively analyzed 290 questionnaires from patients with diabetes mellitus (54.13% women) enclosed in the medical records from Diabetic Foot Center.
Results. The mean patients’ age was 63.24; 7.6% participants suffered from type 1 and 92.4 % from type 2 diabetes; 17.6% patients declared previous foot examination: 31.8% with type 1, 16.4% with type 2 diabetes and it was irrespective from: age, diabetes duration (p = 0.6 and p = 0.37 respectively) and diabetes type (p = 0.068).
Conclusion. The foot examination among patients with diabetes, by medical practitioners, is very poor. Neither patient age nor duration or type of diabetes had an influence on the decision for foot examination in our study. Our study has showed that not the guidelines but inadequate foot examination by medical staff could be the main problem of the prevention of diabetic foot. We should stress and re-educate patients but also medical staff about the foot examination.