An annual survey of type 1 diabetes services will take place as part of a campaign to improve care for people with the condition.
The Type 1 Diabetes Clinical Collaborative has been launched by Association of British Clinical Diabetologists (ABCD), which is made of up of diabetes consultants, alongside Diabetes UK.
The campaign wants to make sure that every multi-disciplinary diabetes team – which consists of all the professionals that make up a diabetes service, including doctors, nurses and podiatrists – in the UK is meeting current standards of care.
It aims to establish how many NHS teams are delivering specialist type 1 diabetes care either in hospitals or in the community. Data will then be collected ever year from each organisation to benchmark standards and also to understand the makeup of each service.
As part of the move, a committee has been formed consisting of healthcare professionals representing the different roles of a diabetes team from across the UK.
Former ABCD chair Dr Rob Gregory, a diabetes consultant from the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust is the chair and Professor Stephanie Amiel, from King’s College London, and the University of Sheffield’s Professor Simon Heller are non-executive co-chairs.
The mission statement of the committee is to “ensure that everyone with type 1 diabetes has access to a suitably-trained multidisciplinary specialist team for expert assessment, care and support for self-management”.
Other themes of the campaign include looking at insulin pumps and other technologies as well as professional diabetes training and education.
The committee will also be looking at education for people with diabetes, ensuring that approved courses are available to people with the condition upon diagnosis and other “relevant times”.
Other aspects that it will focus on include transitional care between pediatric and adult care as well as quality improvement through collecting information.
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