Study of knowledge, perception, and practice of patients regarding fasting requirements for blood glucose testing

Background: Patient preparation is one of the least standardized parts of the preanalytic phase oftesting. Fasting blood glucose requires fasting for 8-12 hours as per various guidelines and also hasseveral other requirements. Lack of communication, understanding, or compliance regarding hours-of-fasting, water-intake, avoidance of caloric snack/beverage, the sudden change in smoking,exercise, alcohol, medication, etc. introduces preanalytic errors. Method: To evaluate awareness,understanding, and compliance with fasting requirements, a face-to-face survey was done onoutpatients in a Government Hospital in Pali, Rajasthan, India. Relatively more educated internetusers were surveyed as controls through an online SurveyMonkey tool. Results: 98 patients and187 controls participated in the study. Perception about fasting requirements ranged from 0-17hours. 71% of patients and 35% of controls perceived that nobody explained to them the durationor nature of fasting. The different sources of information had been used in different proportions bypatients and controls. For imparting understanding and compliance about duration, and otherrequirements of fasting, the instruction was usually incomplete but still much more effective (p-value=0.000002) than formal education level (p-value=0.024). Conclusion: 71% of patients and35% of controls did not receive instructions for fasting. 40% of those instructed showed bettercompliance, but awareness was incomplete. The instruction was more effective than formaleducation in improving awareness and compliance. Improved awareness was strongly associatedwith receiving instruction and weakly associated with formal education but financial status showedonly a weak negative association.