Quality improvement in practice: improving diabetes care and patient outcomes in Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services

Table 2 Clinical outcome measures and proportion of patients whose outcome values met recommended clinical targets, and corresponding values from the final years of other studies

	Study sites					National indigenous PHC^‡	DAHS 2008-09^¶
	DAHS	ACCHS-2	ACCHS-3	ACCHS-4	All ACCHSs	National indigenous PHC^‡	DAHS 2008-09^¶
Median annual clinical outcome measures
HbA_1c (%)	8	8.5	8.7^†	8.1	8.2	8.8-9.2	8.0
BP systolic (mmHg)	127	130	125	135*	128	126-133	120
BP diastolic (mmHg)	77	80	80^†	83*	78	77-80	75
Total cholesterol (mmol/L)	4.4	4.6	4.8*	4.2	4.5	4.7-4.8	4.5
ACR	8.7	15.6	44.1*	3.6	15.6	5.9-7.1
Proportion of study population with median values that met targets
HbA_1c ≤7%	31%	25%	16%*	17%	26%	16-32	34%
BP ≤130/80**	53%	47%	48%	19%*	38%	28-64	69%
Total cholesterol ≤4 mmol/L	39%	42%	19%*	27%	34%	29	25%
ACR <3.6 mg/mmol	38%	29%	16%*	44%	30%	38

DAHS = Derby Aboriginal Health Service. PHC = primary health care. HbA_1c = glycated haemoglobin. BP = blood pressure. ACR = albumin creatinine ratio.
^‡Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients treated in PHC settings [29, 30, 34–37].
^¶Final year of the “DAHS diabetes study” [28].
*Statistically significant difference (P ≤ 0.05) when compared with ACCHS 1.
^†Approached statistical significance when compared with DAHS (P = 0.05).
^**At least half of each participant’s recorded measurements met the recommended target for both systolic and diastolic BP.

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