The Link: Vol 11 No 8

People with diabetes are always at the heart of the National Diabetes Support Team’s work, but never more so than over the last few weeks, with the launch of the Diabetes Year of Care pilot sites and a series of user involvement tools.

On Friday 7th September, the Diabetes Year of Care pilot sites were announced by National Clinical Director for Diabetes Sue Roberts at a launch event at the Northumbria Diabetes Resource Centre. Year of Care, a project supported by Health Secretary Alan Johnson, is about people with diabetes taking charge of their condition and working in partnership with healthcare professionals to plan their care. Year of Care describes all the planned care that a person with diabetes should expect to receive, usually over the course of a year. This includes support for self management in line with national standards and, where appropriate, planned specialist referrals.

This national pilot project, backed by Diabetes UK, the Department of Health, the National Diabetes Support Team (NDST) and the Health Foundation, aims to find out how this will work in practice. The annual review appointment will become a care planning discussion where the person with diabetes is on equal footing with the healthcare professional. They will jointly decide on the most appropriate options for them. The plan they arrive at will form the basis of their individual Year of Care, which will have implications for commissioning. The pilot will test whether or not it is feasible for the system to work around individual needs in this way.

Twenty-three diabetes services in England put themselves forward to be pilot sites. The three successful sites are:

• North Tyneside and Northumberland
• Calderdale and Kirklees
• Tower Hamlets. 

More partnership work, this time with Diabetes UK and London Metropolitan University, has produced four tools to support user involvement:

• Involving service users in diabetes services: self-assessment checklist for NHS services. This is a self-assessment tool to help diabetes networks and NHS managers with responsibility for patient and public involvement, as well as others, including GP practices and user representatives who want to assess how service users are involved.
• User involvement and diabetes services. Toolkit for primary care trusts. This is a toolkit to help train staff to promote service user involvement in diabetes services.
• Making a difference: How you can help improve diabetes services. This provides information about opportunities for getting involved in, and supporting, the NHS to provide better services for people with diabetes and the public.
• Involving the uninvolved: A guide to user involvement in improving diabetes. This aims to connect with people with diabetes who have not previously been involved with services.

These tools will shortly be available on the NDST website: www.diabetes.nhs.uk.

Sally Brooks, NDST