The Home GTT

Introduction:

Aims:

To assess the burden of in-hospital GTT testing for women, if any, and patient preference for home or hospital testing.

 To evaluate the overall cost of in-hospital GTT testing to the women, compared with home testing.

Methods:

Step 1

We formulated a questionnaire which detailed all the necessary points around the different financial and time costs to the patients attending their GTT appointment.

Step 2

These questionnaires were distributed at random to the patients attending their GTT appointment on the antenatal ward between 10/05/22 and 08/07/22. This was led by the midwives and Maternity Support Workers supervising the tests. Each questionnaire was anonymised using only the patient hospital number.

Step 3

Some patients wrote free text which seemed contradictory to their numeric evaluation response. These patients were contacted to further clarify their answers. If patients reported that they would not be happy for home GTT testing, they were also contacted in order to better understand their rationale and opinion, and thus fully understand the implications of implementing such a testing protocol with these patients.

Results:

57%, had no children at home. Of the women who did have children at home, 69% (n=16) had at least one child aged 10 years or younger, and 44% (n=16) had more than one child at home.


Only 1 woman had to pay for childcare to attend her appointment, and this was at a cost of £70.

Only 37% of women had had a previous glucose tolerance test. For 4 of these women, they had had more than 1 previous test. 

Drawbacks;

  - Distraction from young children and pets at home
  - Concern about ‘how they would perform a blood test’.

  - Preference for nursing staff to carry out the test and monitor them

  -  Inability to arrange childcare if they were at home

  - 8 Patients needed to call on relatives to look after their pets.
  - 9 women had to take time off work to attend the appointment.
  - 3 women reported needing to arrange with friends or family to drop them off to hospital.

Implications:

Financial Cost

Time Cost

Organisational Cost