Diabetes registry and service in Nigerian suburban areas: experience at a secondary healthcare facility

Diabetes registry and service in Nigerian suburban areas: experience at a secondary healthcare facility

Background: Disease registries help to provide quality healthcare, including chronic care. As part of ongoing bringing research in diabetes to global environments and systems 2 project in Delta State, Nigeria; a preliminary concern is completeness of clinical assessments and data collection that would enable patients’ follow-up. The aim of this piece of work is to investigate if data collected for local diabetes registry is complete and sufficient to provide better understanding of the disease epidemiology and treatment follow-up.

Methods: This was a purposive medical records audit at public secondary level hospital that followed initial development of diabetes register at the Catholic Hospital, Abbi with 44 pieces of clinical and demographic information. At the public hospitals, 93 patients’ medical records were audited and the data were entered into the register and evaluated, descriptively.

Results: The results show that about 52% of the 44 itemized information were collected, of which completeness of data/documentation was as low as 3% in some items. Blood pressure assessment was done on 70% of patients and 16% of patients had diabetes complications. Lifestyle regimen monitoring was not documented. Neither incidence nor morbidity and mortality rate could be definitively ascertained.

Conclusions: Quality of clinical data documentation was poor. This study contributes a measure of community needs assessment for professional development training on diabetes.