Diabetes screening goes mobile to neighborhoods
Reported August 10, 2008
WASHINGTON – Getting tested for diabetes is smart, preventative medicine for everyone, but it has a much deeper meaning for Vanessa Rushing.
“My great grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and three of my mother’s sisters all died from diabetes,” Rushing, 44, said.
So, when the Howard University Hospital Diabetes Treatment Center Mobile Unit came to the CVS/Pharmacy where Rushing works in northeast Washington, D.C., she was one of the first in line to be tested.
Rushing is one of hundreds being tested across the District from June through September by the Diabetes Treatment Center Mobile Unit under a grant from the city’s Department of Health to test and treat underserved residents in five of the city’s eight wards for diabetes.
Dr. Gail Nunlee-Bland, director of the Diabetes Treatment Center, said she and her staff decided on using large mobile unit because they felt they could reach more people by going out into the community.
“It allows us to see the breadth of the severity of the disease by looking at various neighborhoods to see who is at risk, how they are being treated and whether they are being treated,” she said.
Dr. Nunlee-Bland said 13.3 percent of African Americans have diabetes compared to 8 percent for the general population and African Americans and Hispanics have higher rates of complications from diabetes, like blindness, amputation, kidney disease, and these can be prevented.
“We’d like to reduce those complications, and we’d like to catch the problem early enough to keep the person from developing diabetes,” she stated.
The need for such screenings and treatment has been apparent. Patients’ glucose levels have been so high in some cases that they had to be sent immediately to the emergency room. In one case, a person’s blood sugar level was so elevated that it wouldn’t register on the testing equipment.
The staff initially had hoped to screen about 250 people, at the current rate, is expected to have tested more than 1,000 by the end of September. The Center hopes to renew the grant for October.
“It’s been an eye-opener,” Dr. Nunlee-Bland said. “We’ve definitely exceeded our target.”
Rushing tested negative for diabetes, but she said she’s glad she checked, and she plans checking every year.
“I did it for me,” she said, “but I also did it for the three generations of women I’ve lost to diabetes. I think they would want me to do it.”