**Participants needed for MSc research: Does CGM impact your life?**

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amy_rebecca

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**Help Needed for MSc Research on Continuous Glucose Monitoring!**

Hello everyone!

I’m currently pursuing my MSc in Nutrition & Dietetics at the University of Chester and need your support for my research project. This project is open for both patients and healthcare professionals.

**Project Title:** A Cross-Sectional Study of Patient vs. Healthcare Professional Satisfaction: The Use of Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Sensors on Glucose Control and Lifestyle.

This study is available on the following link on the DiabetesUK website: https://www.diabetes.org.uk/our-research/get-involved/take-part-in-research/CGM-impact

Your participation will be invaluable to my research. Even if you don’t fit the criteria, sharing this with others would be a great help! Thank you in advance for your support.

This has been approved by Mike @everydayupsanddowns
 
I agree @Robin although between 4 and 10 would have been the best choice since that is what we are aiming for and currently back up to 94% TIR after several months in the mid 80s. 🙄

The other question I had problems with was about predicted HbA1c as my Libre was predicting 39 and the lowest option was for 42- 45..... which I opted for but not strictly true. Of course Libre predicts lower than I actually get, but it was asking about the prediction.
 
I filled it in but am unsure if it submitted properly. Had to say I have 1 - 3 hypos a week. I haven't had one in over 90 days because I get an alert at 4.3 and fend them off. I also get strong symptoms around that level. That's one of the brilliant things about CGM
 
Done - but the TIR question was tricky as mine also goes across the entire range in a day (needs clarification on time) and I also haven't had a hypo in the last two months
 
Done - but would have liked to see a question comparing the difference between finger pricking and the sensor withregards to how they impact on how conscious you are about your blood glucose and how much more or less your daily diabetes management effort is with a CGM. Personally i think i spend more time thinking about blood glucose in an hour than I spent in a week when finger pricking.....
 
It would be interesting to know if the survey questions were piloted on actual people with diabetes...! *
If not, that would explain why some of the questions don't make too much sense (as mentioned above).
Good questionnaire design is hard.

* perhaps this could be a prerequisite for the approval of a survey by the Moderators?
 
John Gray said:
It would be interesting to know if the survey questions were piloted on actual people with diabetes...! *
If not, that would explain why some of the questions don't make too much sense (as mentioned above).
Good questionnaire design is hard.

* perhaps this could be a prerequisite for the approval of a survey by the Moderators?
Click to expand...
Which is why Warwick University Medical School (when they were highly involved in diabetes research at the end of last century and the start of this one) set up a diabetes user group which I was part of, after I retired from work in 1998. All such things had to come to the group before even going to the ethics committee to ensure the questions we worded right and there was no ambiguity plus not in text you couldn't read cos it was too small or something, or printed on a silly colour background which people with retinopathy/maculopathy/glaucoma would find difficult if it was for a printed leaflet for clinics/GP surgeries.

Then Warwick Uni stopped doing A Lot of D research - so the group folded.
 
Robin said:
Done! The only question I had difficulty with was choosing the band that my Blood Glucose lies in, only being able to choose one of 4-7, or 7-10, or 11+ etc. Mine often spans the whole spectrum during the course of a day.
Click to expand...
Yes this, also I don't have a hypo a week now, an option less than 1 -3 would be useful, or a text box
 
I have done it, but some questions did not give options that would work.
What type of sensor?
Insulin Pump was one of the answers. I guess this covers patch pumps with inbuilt sensors. I use a separate sensor with my insulin pump but could not tick both
Glucose levels?
As others have said mint typically range over all those levels depending on what I have eaten and done. It will give an unrealistic picture as it required us to tick one of the ranges.
Hypos
I had to tick 1-3 but this is not realistic. I usually head them off before they get there.

Like @John Gray I suspect that they have not trialled this with people who have diabetes, but have checked with statisticians who check that all possible answers are covered with no omissions and no overlaps. Easy to process responses afterwards but this will not give an accurate picture of how we use our sensors.

@everydayupsanddowns is there any check on the quality of the surveys given the okay?
 
amy_rebecca said:
**Help Needed for MSc Research on Continuous Glucose Monitoring!**

Hello everyone!

I’m currently pursuing my MSc in Nutrition & Dietetics at the University of Chester and need your support for my research project. This project is open for both patients and healthcare professionals.

**Project Title:** A Cross-Sectional Study of Patient vs. Healthcare Professional Satisfaction: The Use of Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Sensors on Glucose Control and Lifestyle.

This study is available on the following link on the DiabetesUK website: https://www.diabetes.org.uk/our-research/get-involved/take-part-in-research/CGM-impact

Your participation will be invaluable to my research. Even if you don’t fit the criteria, sharing this with others would be a great help! Thank you in advance for your support.

This has been approved by Mike @everydayupsanddowns
Click to expand...
Hi Amy there are quite a few of us who have found it difficult to fill this in appropriately.
I wonder whether, in order to get a truer picture of how the sensors are used it would be worth reviewing the questions in light of the feedback.
 
Given the feedback from others, I won’t bother trying to fill this in or sharing as it is frustrating when surveys don’t appear to have been tested on diabetics. Nothing specific only to this survey it happens on pretty much every one.
 
amy_rebecca said:
**Help Needed for MSc Research on Continuous Glucose Monitoring!**

Hello everyone!

I’m currently pursuing my MSc in Nutrition & Dietetics at the University of Chester and need your support for my research project. This project is open for both patients and healthcare professionals.

**Project Title:** A Cross-Sectional Study of Patient vs. Healthcare Professional Satisfaction: The Use of Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Sensors on Glucose Control and Lifestyle.

This study is available on the following link on the DiabetesUK website: https://www.diabetes.org.uk/our-research/get-involved/take-part-in-research/CGM-impact

Your participation will be invaluable to my research. Even if you don’t fit the criteria, sharing this with others would be a great help! Thank you in advance for your support.

This has been approved by Mike @everydayupsanddowns
Click to expand...
Goodluck with your study.
 
John Gray said:
* perhaps this could be a prerequisite for the approval of a survey by the Moderators?
Click to expand...

SB2015 said:
@everydayupsanddowns is there any check on the quality of the surveys given the okay?
Click to expand...

We check that any research requests have been through an Ethics Approval process to ensure that ethical concerns for participants have been considered, but because of the nature of the variety of requests we receive the mods don’t screen the specifics of the questionnaires themselves.

I wouldn”t feel qualified to say whether or not a questionnaire about experiences of pregnancy, or amputation, or kidney disease treatment, or various aspects of living with T2D were well put together, because I haven’t had experience of those!

Experience suggests the members are pretty skilled at identifying snags / glitches and them feeding back to researchers 🙂
 
everydayupsanddowns said:
We check that any research requests have been through an Ethics Approval process to ensure that ethical concerns for participants have been considered, but because of the nature of the variety of requests we receive the mods don’t screen the specifics of the questionnaires themselves.

I wouldn't feel qualified to say whether or not a questionnaire about experiences of pregnancy, or amputation, or kidney disease treatment, or various aspects of living with T2D were well put together, because I haven’t had experience of those!
Click to expand...
My point would be satisfied if the research request originator could answer Yes to your question to them:
"Has your survey already been piloted, tested and validated on a sufficiently large quantity of persons with diabetes of all relevant Types?"...
The emphasis would be on them to have done the preliminary work, not on you to assess its validity!
The end result should be a set of sensible and intelligent questions, which would become valuable research.
----------
There was a survey on "Loneliness" put out a couple of years ago by the BBC Radio 4 programme "All In The Mind", in which each question made no distinction between
  • a positive selection for the zero option on the scale of 0-9, and
  • not replying to the question at all (which was allowed).
since the default (zero) option was pre-selected for the user.
How they managed to disentangle the results of that error, if they even could, I do not know...
 
Perhaps it would be worth offering our collective services to review potential questionnaires (before they are posted to be answered) - it would be useful to know what the survey purpose is beforehand though, to understand whether the questions actually address the question to be answered. I've no idea whether said questionnaires go out to a wider audience than just this forum, if not, is this a form of cheating/gaming the system? Probably not, as we can suggest the right questions to be answered to get useful information.

Just a thought from a person who has designed a questionnaire or two as part of his PhD (with no expertise in how to do this) and realised that it's a massive PITA (distraction from the things you do know about, and difficult to create something reasonably optimal in a hurry, as is usually the case).
 
Questionnaire design isn’t always straightforward. I think at PhD level, @SimonP you're allowed to design your own, but when daughter was doing an MSc, she was told she had to use an 'off the peg' set of questions which had previously been approved by the ethics committee. (This was only a feedback survey, you couldn’t expect them to have an 'off the peg' diabetes one handy). She argued that the questions were inappropriate for her particular work, and was allowed to skip the survey without losing marks for not having done one.
 
Interesting @Robin

I was involved in a review of research materials once, with a panel of other T1s, and some of the suggestions we made couldn’t be actioned because they related to a ‘validated data capture tool’, that already existed. And you couldn’t change the slightly frustrating asking of the same question multiple times without invalidating the tool.
 
Robin said:
, but when daughter was doing an MSc, she was told she had to use an 'off the peg' set of questions which had previously been approved by the ethics committee
Click to expand...
for GCSE Statistics the students were expected to be able to design their own questionnaires, and to ciriticise examples that they were given! They checked that everyone had a possible answer and were expected to use samples >50 (still quite small) in their coursework.
I know there is no coursework now but I certainly learnt a lot when teaching this course (20 years ago)
 
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