Women's experiences with managing advice on gestational diabetes - a qualitative interview study.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to gain insight into women's experiences with gestational diabetes and their strategies to cope with advice for changing lifestyle. Further, health care professionals' approach to women with gestational diabetes is discussed. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews with nine women with gestational diabetes were conducted at a university hospital, adopting a phenomenological approach. RESULTS: Three themes were created: 1) Experience of control, 2) personal strategies, and 3) unintended consequences. Women experienced that the monitoring at the outpatient clinic was associated with surveillance and safety and adopted different strategies to cope with gestational diabetes. Some women experienced feeling different and labelled due to the monitoring and their eating habits. Some women expressed concern for the baby and the risk of getting diabetes after birth. Women's experiences and how they transfer and cope with information about gestational diabetes at an outpatient obstetric clinic are brought forward, and it became evident that individual needs in gestational diabetes care are not being met in all situations. CONCLUSION: Women experienced surveillance and safety while being monitored at the outpatient clinic. At the same time, self-monitoring seemed to stimulate feelings of concern about other's reactions to the condition. In addition, we found that women's strategies for behaviour change included limited food intake, controlling food purchases, and being physically active. Concerning the management of gestational diabetes, some women felt that the information was not sufficiently adapted to their individual needs, thus health professionals' approach to gestational diabetes should be based on the women's perspective.

Teaching Epistemology - Workshop as a Method for making Epistemology Relevant to Students.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Introducing epistemology to healthcare students represents a challenge. Yet to be able to practice based on evidence, it is important that healthcare professionals gain an adequate level of research literacy as part of their health care education. This article presents a new way to teach epistemology using a workshop design. Three scientific perspectives on epistemology: humanistic, social science and natural science, are used as lenses to analyse situations from everyday healthcare practice represented by a video. Video is used to facilitate transfer of knowledge and to make it meaningful for students to engage in learning epistemology. Afterwards, three teachers facilitate the students' group work to ensure they get to understand the difference between the scientific perspectives. The workshop has received very good evaluations as students state that for the first time they understand how epistemology directly links to practice.