medwireNews: YouTube videos about diabetic foot examination are popular, but of poor quality, report UK researchers.
“There is a need for high-quality comprehensive diabetes foot examination videos for the general public that are based on scientific sources,” they say.
Abdullah Almaqhawi (Leicester General Hospital, UK) and study co-authors looked at the top 100 videos surfaced on YouTube by the search term “diabetic foot examination,” which, on average, had more than 100,000 views each.
The researchers rated the videos’ educational quality specific to diabetes foot examination using the 15-item Diabetes UK annual foot check scoring checklist tool (DUK-C), and found an average score of 5.07 out of a possible 15; no video scored 14 or 15.
They also assessed video reliability, based on the JAMA criteria (authorship, attribution, currency, and disclosure), and general educational quality, using the Global Quality Score (GQS). The average scores for these were just 1.15 out of a possible 4.00 and 2.32 out of a possible 5.00.
Physicians were the most common video upload source, at 28%, and their videos had an average DUK-C score of 5.67, which was only slightly higher than the overall average. The same was true for JAMA score and GQS, at 1.30 and 2.56, respectively.
“It has been suggested that videos created by physicians are more reliable and better quality than videos created by non-physicians, though this would not seem to be the case in this instance,” Almaqhawi and colleagues write in Diabetic Medicine.
Instead, the best scores came from videos with multiple upload sources (6% of all videos), at an average of 8.14, 2.00, and 3.14 for DUK-C, JAMA, and GQS, respectively.
The findings “imply that publicly available videos about foot care examination are not an adequate tool for patient education at this time,” the team concludes.
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Diabet Med 2022; doi:10.1111/dme.14936