Nursing
Behavioral Strategies to Improve Chronic Illness
Management
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The population of older Americans with chronic diseases is expanding. The number of persons with diabetes is expected to rise by 165 percent during the next fifty years. For adults aged 75 and older the number of persons with diabetes will quadruple, increasing more than 200 percent. The majority of morbidity, mortality, and costs associated with diabetes may be preventable with better provider and self-management. Dr. Cynthia Corbett’s research focuses on behavioral strategies to improve chronic illness management and resultant outcomes.
Major goals of Dr. Corbett’s research are to:
- Test innovative diabetes management interventions;
- Examine the impact of community-based point-of-care testing (e.g., A1c, lipids);
- Refine diabetes quality of life measures to improve outcome evaluation;
- Explore strategies to cost-effectively integrate data-based findings into routine health practices.
Currently, Dr. Corbett and a multi-disciplinary team of collaborators are conducting a randomized clinical trial involving older adults with diabetes who reside in independent living communities. The effect of a standardized chronic illness management intervention on physiologic, psychosocial, and health care utilization outcomes is being evaluated. Specifically, outcomes such as A1c, lipids, blood pressure, quality of life, demands of illness, confidence in self-management, and health care utilization will be analyzed. In a separate study, she is leading a research team to refine a measure of diabetes demands of illness and explore the relationship between perceived illness demands and depression in older adults with diabetes. Dr. Corbett’s prior diabetes research has been in the home health care arena. The findings of these studies have been widely disseminated at conferences and in home health care journals with resultant evidence of clinical practice changes in the industry.
Contact Information
Dr. Cynthia Lou Corbett, Ph.D
Assistant Professor
Intercollegiate College of Nursing
2917 W Fort George Wright Drive
Spokane, WA 99224-5291
Telephone: 509-324-7284
E-mail: corbett@wsu.edu
Health and Life Sciences
Diabetes
Washington State University is building programs on the social science and science of diabetes. The faculty highlighted here provide insight into ongoing research focused on ways to communicate across cultural boundaries about the causes of and risks of diabetes, to test hypotheses about advertising products and lifestyles that will lead to fewer instances of diabetes, and to better understand the fundamental science that underlies diabetes and its eventual cure. Each of these scientists and their many collaborators, both at WSU and the health care organizations in the region, will significantly impact this important area.
- Sue Butkus
- Cynthia F. Corbett
- Stephen Setter
- Robert Short
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Dr. Cynthia F. Corbett received her B.A. in nursing (1985) from Carroll College, a master of nursing from Whitworth College (1989), and a Ph.D. in nursing from Loyola University of Chicago in 1998. Dr. Corbett’s interest in diabetes developed while working with home health care patients of whom one-third had diabetes. She has since been committed to improving provider and self-management interventions through research. Dr. Corbett’s research has been funded by Sigma Theta Tau International, the American Nurses Foundation, and the American Association of Diabetes Educators. From a national applicant pool, an independent academic advisory board recently selected Dr. Corbett as one of two U.S. Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Inc. 2002 Innovations in Health Outcomes Postdoctoral Fellows. The fellowship affords Dr. Corbett the opportunity to focus the majority of her time on diabetes and health outcomes research for two calendar years. |
