New guidelines will assist in early diabetes detection – Min. Anthony

The Ministry of Health in collaboration with the Mount Sinai Health System, will be launching a new guideline to better manage the diagnosis of diabetes.

Minister of Health Dr Frank Anthony disclosed on Thursday evening as he appeared on the weekly televised programme, ‘The Guyana Dialogue.’

The guidelines will officially be available in July, and there will simultaneously be comprehensive training for healthcare professionals.

“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,” the minister explained.

The introduction of the new guidelines in Guyana will allow healthcare professionals to move away from using glucometer machines to A1C or HbA1c tests to diagnose diabetes.

The HbA1c test is a simple blood test that measures your average blood sugar levels over the past three months. It’s one of the most commonly used tests to diagnose prediabetes and diabetes.

“We feel that HbA1c is a more reliable marker. So, one of the things with these new guidelines is that we’d be benchmarking using HbA1c and we have bought a number of these machines that we’d be putting in primary healthcare settings,” the health minister asserted.These are some of the changes that are being implemented to improve the management of diabetes patients in Guyana.

Diabetes remains one of the most common non-communicable diseases that the ministry is aiming to address by implementing preventative measures and early detection in patients.

“We’re also working to improve the management of complications that diabetic patients would have. So, we have started to improve our foot clinics. We have had quite a few programmes dealing with foot care. Unfortunately, a lot of these programmes would have fallen to the wayside, so we are now restoring some of them,” he disclosed.