Your Antenatal Visits with GDM
Reviewed by CDE Mehandi Sharma · Updated
A GDM diagnosis changes the shape of your antenatal care. Expect more visits, more monitoring, and more than one clinician involved.
The team usually includes your obstetrician, who manages the pregnancy and the delivery; a diabetes educator or nutritionist, who works on the eating plan and your readings; and sometimes a physician or endocrinologist if you are on insulin. A paediatrician becomes involved around the birth.
Visits typically become more frequent — often every two weeks, then weekly towards the end. Growth scans are added to check how your baby is developing, and monitoring of your baby's wellbeing increases in the last weeks.
What to take to every appointment: your glucose readings with the meals noted beside them, your meter itself, a list of any medicines including insulin doses, and any questions written down.
The readings are the important one. A doctor looking at two weeks of annotated numbers can make a specific adjustment. A doctor asking "how have your sugars been?" and hearing "mostly fine" cannot.
Questions worth asking as you go: are my readings where they need to be, is my baby's growth on track, what happens at delivery, and when is my postpartum test booked.
That last one is worth raising before you deliver, because it is the appointment most often missed.