Accu Chek

There are 6 simple steps that you can take to make testing your blood glucose a lot less painful. At the moment, to accurately check our blood glucose the only way to do this, is to prick our fingers and check the resulting blood for glucose.

The tips below focus on ways to get more blood out when you prick your finger with a lancet so that it does not need to penetrate the skin deeply and thus makes it a lot less painful!

1) Wash your hands with soap and warm water – this will help keep the testing site clean and help dilate the blood vessels in the fingers to increase blood flow.

2) Massage your finger downwards to the tip of your finger – this will help push blood towards the tip of your finger so that when it is pricked there is plenty of blood there ready to come out.

3) Have your testing hand pointing downwards below your waist – blood will flow more easily when following gravity downwards.

4) Set your lancing device – lancing devices have different settings to pierce the skin at different depths. If you use the tips in this article you should find that you will be able to use a lower setting but still have enough blood for testing. Try changing the settings to find the right level.

5) Select the right meter – different blood glucose meters require different amounts of blood to carry out a blood glucose testing. The less blood needed the less painful testing will be. Choose a meter that requires only a small testing sample such as the Accu-chek Aviva which needs only 0.6 microliter

6) Alternate your fingers – don’t use the same finger over and over again. You have 8 fingers distribute the testing evenly. You’ll find your fingers will recover much faster and blood flow will be better.

8 Tips on Avoiding Mistakes

1)      Using out of date strips – test strips have expiry dates just like food and if you use test strips after their expiry date you may get an error message on your meter or worse a wrong reading without knowing it.

2)      Wrong test strips code – most test strips come with an individual code on the bottle/packaging. This code must match the code displayed on your glucose meter.

3)      Re-using a lancet – this is a common mistake. Re-using a lancet could affect the accuracy of your reading and could be very painful.

4)      Uncapped test strips – test strips need to be kept capped in their container. If the container is uncapped for too long then this can affect the accuracy of the test strips.

5)      Poor storage conditions – test strips need to be stored in a dark, cool, dry place. If they are not, this can affect the accuracy of the strip.

6)      Meter accuracy – the best way to check your meter is still accurate is to do a control check. Aim to do a control check at least every 3 months and perhaps each time you use a new box of test strips.

7)      Order of testing – some meters, such as the one touch ultra range, require you to put the strips into the meter first then place the blood sample onto the strip

8)      Meter units – glucose meters can measure in 2 units, mmol/l or mg/dl. Which units your meter measures in does not really matter as long as YOU know what units it measures.

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