DigiBete.org is a not-for-profit organisation working in partnership with Leeds Children’s Hospital to extend the brilliant work the Children’s Diabetes Clinics do online. DigiBete and the story of its conception were recently discussed in this journal. Since then, we have been very busy at DigiBete HQ. We’ve been on the road talking to healthcare professionals and families all over the country and we have been planning and creating our brand new website, which is due to launch towards the end of the year, complete with a fresh digital curriculum to support the Goals of Diabetes Education.
Before embarking on DigiBete, our experiences of the NHS systems were that they could be fairly manual and did not always harness available technologies to assist self-management. We know that good access to education and ongoing training for everyone involved in care is vital to successful self-management and improved blood glucose control; therefore, we have set out to investigate how we can best harness DigiBete to make training available to the wider community of carers, teachers and supporters 24/7. This is especially important as children and young people spend significant proportions of their day outside of the home. It is very important to us, as a patient-led organisation, that every resource we produce is co-designed with healthcare professionals and families.
It is a very exciting time for type 1 diabetes education. A highlight of our last few months was filming the inspirational 18-year-old winner of the BBC Young Musician 2016 competition, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, talking about his career in music whilst managing his type 1 diabetes. You can find the story at http://www.digibete.org/my-t1d-story
If there are any resources you’d like to see on the DigiBete site, you can drop us a line at hello@digibete.org
