Monitor on Psychology - January 2012 - (Page 26)

“Psychologists have become welcome additions to diabetes teams, partly because of Suzanne and a handful of other leading psychologists.” LArry c. Deeb Former president, American Diabetes Association advancing health and increasing recognition of psychology as a science — mirror APA’s new strategic plan. That’s no accident — Johnson helped draft the plan and strongly supports its goals. “This is the first strategic plan APA has ever had, and I think it’s a very important way to coordinate, prioritize and focus our resources.” Showing psychology’s value When Johnson began her career in the 1970s, she wanted to study a more traditional topic for psychologists: dyslexia. But when she fell in love and married Nate Perry, PhD, then the University of Florida’s Health Science Center’s Clinical and Health Psychology Department chair, nepotism rules exiled her to the medical school’s department of psychiatry. That move ended up working out for her and for the children at the inpatient pediatric diabetes program Johnson was assigned to. These children, some physicians posited, had a particularly virulent form of diabetes. However, when children were housed in this inpatient program, it quickly became obvious that there was no medical cause for their especially severe symptoms. Instead, the culprit was poor family coping strategies and poor adherence to the diabetes management regimen. Managing Type-1 diabetes — which is typically diagnosed in childhood — is an incredibly challenging task. People with Type-1 diabetes must take multiple insulin injections daily and calibrate insulin dosage and timing by taking into account their current blood sugar levels, how much they’ve eaten and their level of physical activity. That picture is further complicated by children’s natural desire for independence and other family dynamics. To help health-care professionals understand the factors at play, Johnson and her colleagues have developed more sophisticated ways to assess how well patients are managing their diabetes. For example, she urges health teams to routinely ask diabetes patients to detail their insulin administration, blood glucose levels, eating and exercising over the past 24 hours. These systematic self-reports work much better than the old method in which physicians simply conducted a blood hemoglobin A1C test and inferred how well patients were managing their diabetes, Johnson says. She has also developed ways to screen children and families to determine which will be most likely to have conflicts over 26 diabetes management. Johnson’s measures are now standard practice among diabetes teams and have resulted in much better diabetes management, says Deeb. Work ahead These days, Johnson is collaborating on one of the most ambitious diabetes studies to date — a large-scale longitudinal study known as the Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young Study. Researchers at three sites in the United States and in Sweden, Finland and Germany are following thousands of babies who are genetically predisposed to diabetes to see what environmental factors trigger the disease. Johnson co-chairs the psychosocial studies of the NIH international trial. It’s important that participants stay in the study for its 15-year duration, so Johnson drew from the psychological literature and developed a “dropout risk score” for each family. The study’s researchers have used the score to reduce study dropout rates by targeting those families at high risk for drop out and delivering a tailored intervention to better retain them in the study. “Using psychological measures to understand enrollment and retention in clinical trials is another way psychologists can contribute to interdisciplinary research,” she says. “I think that’s something we should be doing more of.” Given her background, it’s no surprise that Johnson will use her APA presidency to ensure psychologists have a central role in primary care and medical research. To that end, she has convened a group of psychologists to identify what competencies psychologists should have to practice in primarycare interdisciplinary teams. Unlike many previous task forces, the group is interorganizational in its composition. “I hope to have an actual product at the end of my presidency that will be shared by a number of organizations besides APA,” says Johnson. The effort, she says, will also serve to educate health professionals about the important ways psychologists can contribute as members of primary healthcare teams. “We have so much to contribute as scientists and health-care professionals; it’s incumbent upon us to make that known,” she says. n M o n i t o r o n p s y c h o l o g y • J a n u a ry 2 0 1 2

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Monitor on Psychology - January 2012

Monitor on Psychology - January 2012
Letters
President’s Column
Contents
Contents
From the CEO
Apa’s Statement on the Dsm-5 Development Process
Girl Scouts Badge Promotes Positive Psychology
Early Investments Pay Off for Poor Children, Study Finds
Apa Meets With Chinese Psychological Society to Further Interaction and Exchange
Unique Opportunity for Psychologists to Travel to Cuba
In Brief
Government Relations Update
On Your Behalf
Psychology’s Growing Library of Podcasts
Standing Up for Psychology
Judicial Notebook
Random Sample
Time Capsule
Questionnaire
Science Watch
Beyond Psychotherapy
Perspective on Practice
Yes, Recovery Is Possible
Inequity to Equity
Making E-Learning Work
New Standards for High School Psychology
A Trailblazer Moves On
Psychologist Profile
Plan Now for Psychology’s Regional Meetings
New Journal Editors
Apa News
Division Spotlight
American Psychological Foundation
Personalities

Monitor on Psychology - January 2012

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