Chin Choo Yap, Cai Lian Tam, Saravanan Muniyandy, Amudha Kadirvelu
Introduction: Diabetes has become a global epidemic and no countr y is spared from its negative impacts on their people, healthcare expenditure, na tional productivity, and quality of life. Malaysia, a country located in the diabetes hotspot , is experiencing a rapid growth in diabetic population. Such growth has already exceeded the es timation made by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The demands stemmed from diabet es have caused huge financial burden to the Malaysian healthcare system. Furthermore, the o verall glycaemic control is ranked as suboptimal indicating that diabetes is not well-con trolled in Malaysia as well as challenging the effectiveness of its existing diabetes self-managem ent education. Aims & Objectives: Obtaining a deeper understanding of patients’ attit udes towards diabetes management would help in improving the effectivenes s of the existing diabetes education and management. Based on Self-Determination Theory, th is study explored the participants’ psychosocial aspects by examining the strength of e ach predictor in their self-care activities. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study. Eleven scales wer e used in this survey (which included emotion management, personal attributions, social s upports and diabetes knowledge). Purposive sampling was adopted among 187 adults living with T ype 2 diabetes in Peninsula Malaysia through various healthcare entities. Results: Pearson’s correlation analysis showed significant a ssociation between the 10 variables and diabetes self-care adherence; multiple regressi on analysis indicated that self-efficacy, anxiety, and optimism were the useful predictors, accounting to 13.9% unique contribution to the variance of self-care index. Besides, diabetes knowledge an d social supports were not predictive of self- care activities. Conclusion: The findings highlighted the role of competency-bas ed self-care mastery training and mental health elements in the diabetes education an d management could achieve desired adherence International Journal of Collaborativ e Research on Internal Medicine & Public Health Vol. 7 No. 6 (2015) 105 to physician’s advice and better management of the disease. Desired adherence can be achieved without good level of diabetes knowledge and social supports amongst adult diabetics.
