What level of care do you receive?
There is a minimum level of care that every person with diabetes deserves and should expect from their health service. Getting all the checks, seeing the right healthcare professionals and understanding your diabetes are all essential in helping you manage your condition.
Diabetes Watch
Diabetes UK is committed to ensuring that people with diabetes receive high-quality care wherever they live, and that they know what care to expect.
We believe every person with diabetes, whether Type 1 or Type 2, wherever they live in the UK, deserves the best treatment and services. Getting all the checks, seeing the right healthcare professionals and understanding diabetes are vital in supporting the best possible self-management.
Diabetes Watch is the method by which we will hold health services to account for the diabetes care they provide across the UK.
We will shine a light on the very best services, identifying examples of excellent care, and identify those areas where more needs to be done to ensure people with diabetes are provided with the essential care they need and expect.
Diabetes Watch will assess and monitor the real delivery of services in different areas of diabetes care, as part of Diabetes UK’s commitment to ensuring that people with diabetes receive the best quality care, when they need it.
Diabetes Watch’s main focus will be to report on the quality and standards of care, highlighting issues where nationally they are provided well, and where they need to be addressed. This will provide insight into how certain areas provide services well, and to act as a driver for quality service improvement for those that don’t.
There are two main ways that Diabetes Watch will monitor how well services are provided:
Diabetes – What care you should receive
We have created a simple patient checklist leaflet, "Diabetes – what care you should receive", which outlines 15 healthcare essentials (PDF, 164KB), based on the care standards set out by NICE and NHS Quality Improvement. These include:
- blood glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol checks
- monitoring of eyes, kidney function, legs, feet and weight
- individual care planning, smoking cessation advice, emotional and psychological support
- guidance on accessing specialist care and education courses.
We want people with diabetes in the UK to use this checklist to ensure they are getting all the care they should be. Those who find gaps in their care are encouraged to take the checklist to their healthcare team and raise the issue with them.
These 15 measures may not all be appropriate for children. Children will generally have more frequent HbA1c measurements, and do not generally have formal screening for complications (eg blood pressure, blood fats, eyes feet and kidneys) until they are 12. However, their general health will be monitored by their healthcare team at each appointment.
Diabetes Watch online information tool
We have developed an online information tool to show how the 15 healthcare essentials are being provided in your local health area, using nationally available data.
As well as accessing this information, you can also feed back your views about the care you receive, and see how you can get involved in helping us to do more to improve diabetes care in the UK.
Find out more and start using the tool.
Diabetes – Commissioning and development of services
A set of measures has also been developed that will help us to assess and monitor how well diabetes services are being commissioned and developed to meet the needs of local populations.
The information we gather from people with diabetes about their direct experiences of care they receive locally will also contribute to developing this picture.
Diabetes Watch will also highlight the quality of services by producing regular topic-based reports.