Abstract
The burden of diabetes is increasing in low-income countries, including Cambodia. Hypoglycemia is an important topic in diabetes care: an episode may bring physiological, psychological, and social impacts to patients and their social networks; influence how patients perform self-care and in addition, affect how they maintain their target glycemic levels. Issues around hypoglycemia are complex and cannot be studied with biomedical perspectives alone. Little is known about the situation of hypoglycemia in Cambodian diabetes patients. This project aimed to contribute towards better diabetes care through an exploration of the experience and the meaning of hypoglycemia to Cambodian diabetes patients in cooperation with a local NGO—MoPoTsyo, which provided the accessible and affordable care to the patients. The data was obtained in Phnom Penh city from July to November, 2013 through a qualitative approach with repeated interviews, a focus group discussion, observations and textual analysis. This study highlighted that when exploring participants’ experiences of hypoglycemia, the continuous interpretation of glucose levels was the essential theme to understand. Participants tried to interpret their glucose levels through discomforts they experienced and the terminologies used in Khmer when discussing diabetes and hypoglycemia. Furthermore, they used the results from biomedical measurements even though daily glucose measurements were not available for most diabetes patients in this setting. In addition, the self-care activities were thought to shape their understandings of glucose levels. In turn, these understandings would then influence how they self-manage in their daily lives. Several other influencing factors for self-care were also mentioned in this study, such as influences from social networks and cultural aspects of foods. The findings of this research reflected on how participants and peer educators communicated about the glucose levels, the ways of exchanging information at the checkups and how to address the self-care instructions. As a result, recommendations are given to the organization: emphasize on individual experiences in the checkups; embrace and discuss information from different dimensions; introduce self-care principle instead of standard instructions.