Hispanic patients with type 2 diabetes receive poor diabetes management due to their limited English. A recent study suggests that they were found to be much less likely than non-Hispanic patients to take prescribed diabetes drugs even when they consult with Spanish-speaking doctors. More than 3.1 million Hispanics in the United States have diabetes and must take medication every day, making the research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, significant in the improvement of the delivery of diabetes treatment.
In the study, researchers examined the quality of diabetes care of 31,000 patients with the disease. The patients received healthcare insurance through Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. The results showed that about 60 percent of Spanish-speaking patients did not fill the prescriptions at a rate of at least 20 percent of the time after being given prescriptions to drugs that help control the disease, the Reuters reports.
The study was limited to two years and focused on the effects of language barriers on the quality of diabetes care. Specifically, the study showed that about 52 percent among English-speaking Latino patients skipped doctor's orders, and only about 38 percent among white patients. The study suggests that more needs to be done to improve diabetes management by enhancing "adherence to newly prescribed medications among Latino patients at all levels of English proficiency," Dr. Alicia Fernandez, leader of the research, wrote in the study.
According to the tucson ,the research validates what diabetes specialists are already aware of. One diabetic specialist confirmed that patients with language barriers tend to do worse with management of chronic diseases. Another study confirms the finding when they observed that Hispanic type 2 diabetes patients with limited English skills could get better diabetes management through blood sugar control only when they switch from an English-only speaker primary care doctor to a doctor who fluently speaks Spanish to his or her patients.
