Making the best of it: Practical wisdom in professional care for adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus

Multidisciplinary professional care for adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus has been supported by detailed international consensus guidelines since 1995. However, several professional authors have argued that it takes more than excellent guidelines to give good care also in a moral sense in daily practices. In this article, we report on an exemplary case study into the adolescent diabetes outpatient clinic of a Dutch general hospital, with the aim to explore how practicing professionals enacted the attuning of general guidelines to individual patients in their specific contexts. To realize this aim, we have conducted ethnomethodologically inspired, participatory observations, and an abductive analysis, using tools that have been derived from grounded theory. We carried out the inquiry using the heuristic lenses of relationality and practical wisdom. In addition, we used care ethics and practice theory as theoretical frames. Relationality and practical wisdom appear to be strong vectors of good care in everyday diabetes practice.