NNUH In-patient diabetes team win international award

Members of NNUH specialist In-patient Diabetes Services Team from Elsie Bertram Diabetes Centre are celebrating after winning the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) 2021 Excellence in Patient Care Quality Improvement Award.
The announcement was made during the RCP’s virtual awards ceremony, held throughout the day on Twitter. NNUH’s specialist diabetes in-patient team had been shortlisted for their 18-month programme aimed at helping the thousands of patients with diabetes who are treated at the hospital.

Dr Jason Cheung, NNUH In-patient Diabetologist Consultant and Diabetes UK Clinical Champion, said: “I am immensely proud of the whole team, who worked so hard on this. We have been able to show that we have really improved the outcomes of our patients, and that these improvements are long term.”
Shelley Walker, senior nurse for NNUH In-patient Diabetes Care Team, said: “The team has worked very hard through this very dynamic, challenging time in the past few years, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite all this, we persist with our team effort, and it is very rewarding to see this has visibly made positive improvements for our patients and staff.”
Anna Lartey, senior diabetes nurse educator for the same team, added: “We hope to take this positive momentum forward, in particular during our current on-going team expansion work, to further expand our support to patients with diabetes, and staff that looks after them”
On any given day NNUH has around 200 patients with diabetes on our wards. They can be admitted for any number of medical reasons: in 9 out of 10 cases, the admission reasons are not due to diabetes itself. But the medical illnesses very often negatively impact on their diabetes, which in turn could be detrimental to the health outcome during their hospital stay.
The specialist diabetes team takes care of our patients with diabetes, as well as supporting ward staff in looking after them, through on-demand referral and automated case-finding each day.
The aim of the 18-month improvement programme was to offer and deliver a superior diabetes support service to both patients and ward staff, so that issues affecting patients with diabetes could be better addressed. This might include dangerous glucose levels when it becomes too low or too high: which requires timely and often complex medical treatment and dietary interventions. The specialist team also wanted to empower patients throughout the hospital to better manage and monitor their own condition while in hospital, and this might include blood glucose monitoring and administering their own insulin doses. Dedicated training opportunities on good in-hospital diabetes care were created for our staff. The team also implemented various in-hospital diabetes modern technologies; developed different ways to deliver the support care to suit the individual need of patients and staff, for example through a choice of bedside visit, telephone advice and guidance, or remote virtual online consultations. This work on our service infrastructure also prepared the team well in their support of patients and staff during the Covid-19 pandemic.