Gail Nunlee-Bland, director of Howard University Hospital’s Diabetes Treatment Center, noted that 13.9 percent of African Americans in the District of Columbia are living with diabetes. (Photo by Ron Williams)

By Alan King
AFRO Staff Writer

As director of a community empowerment organization, Ray Bridgewater is convinced that more needs to be done to help diabetics. For starters, he suggests a more coordinated effort of traditional physical education programs in schools in addition to changing the kinds of food served in school cafeterias and replacing soda machines with nutritious alternatives such as orange juice and other fruit drinks.

“A critical assessment needs to be made around food distribution,” he said. “They have to do a better job in looking at the people who they are serving and start asking some questions around their health and how to better prepare food for them that’s not going to be harmful to them.”

Bridgewater was among the more than 40 healthcare providers, community leaders and other stakeholders discussing a regional approach to the diabetes epidemic during a regional summit held last Friday at Howard University.

“We’re not interested in just being a sponsor. It’s relatively easy for us to sign a check,” said Doxie Jordan, assistant vice president of marketing for Novo Nordisk, a healthcare company and self-proclaimed leader in diabetes care that has over 26,000 employees in 79 countries. “What we’re interested in is a partnership.”

The discussion was part of Novo Nordisk’s minority diabetes initiative that’s partnered with six historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that included Jackson State University, Texas Southern University, Florida A&M University, North Carolina A&T State University and Johnson C. Smith University.

Novo Nordisk, assistant vice president of sales; Doxie Jordan, center, and Gail Nunlee-Bland, director of Howard University Hospital’s Diabetes Treatment Center, discussed possible solutions with the attendees.  (Photo by Ron Williams)

Howard University was the fourth HBCU to host the conference.
“They came to us, and I wanted not just to come and have lunch,” said Gail Nunlee-Bland, director of Howard University Hospital (HUH)’s Diabetes Treatment Center. “I wanted a working group that would be able to tackle some of these problems.”

The summit followed a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which stated that new cases of adult diabetes rose more than 90 percent in the past 10 years, with one in eight African Americans over the age of 20 living with the nation’s fifth deadliest disease. Diabetes causes between 12,000 and 24,000 cases of blindness each year and 82,000 people this year will have a limb amputated because of the disease, according to the report.

Aviva Zyskind, medical director of Unity Health Care’s Family Practice, noted the difficulty of linking patients to resources.  She said, “It’s not always available to people who mostly need it.”

Valerie Rochester, Black Women’s Health Imperative’s director of programs, said providers also fail to capitalize on resources already available to patients.
“In a lot of cases, it’s the providers that don’t recognize the importance of family members and family support in working with patients on a treatment regimen for their diabetes,” Rochester said. “They focus on the patient and don’t look at the family members as being able to support that person or needing to understand and being aware of what the treatment protocol is.”

Other suggestions included the use of technology to track patient records and link providers within the same networks so they have equal access to patient information.

“We need to make sure that the patients themselves have the access to the same kinds of technology or the same information that is being shared among organizations providing diabetes education and treatment,” Rochester said. “Text messaging is one of the major things that’s used in order to share information and make sure that patients have access and are aware that these technologies are available that can support them and their treatment.”

In addition to cutting down on the amount of paperwork required, assisting in easy retrieval of medical records and better utilizing the human resources that are within provider organizations, investing in these technologies would also cut down on the $138 billion a year spent on treatment for diabetic patients.

Overall, the goal of the summit was to get some short-term solutions to the diabetes dilemma. Officials said the discussion is on-going despite Novo Nordisk not setting a date for the next summit.

“There’s definitely a need for something like this,” Rochester said. “I hope there are more opportunities to have discussions around this in order to make sure that we can reduce some of the incidents of diabetes in the African-American community.”