Type 2 Diabetes - Transforming the Diagnosis Conversation
Exploring person-centred approaches to diabetes care in partnership with NHS Lanarkshire to create a roadmap for future care.
Summary
By focusing on one key moment in the care journey - the conversation between the primary care health professional and the newly diagnosed type 2 patient - the DHI in partnership with NHS Lanarkshire aimed to understand how secondary care and primary care staff could work more collaboratively to improve self-management in the community and a more consistent approach. Through exploring and mapping current care experiences and identifying aspirations for future care, using co-design methodology, we identified opportunities to redesign the type 2 diabetes diagnosis conversation to support early engagement.
Impact & Value
Emerging insights have revealed several opportunities for improvement:
Engaging people in self-management at diagnosis to reduce later complications and referrals to secondary care;
Improving communication between primary and secondary care to reduce unnecessary referrals and improve the person’s experience;
Using technology to support citizen education and confidence to self-manage.
A project of this nature clearly demonstrates the benefits of working with non-NHS professionals and has resulted in the team considering new approaches to how they deliver some of their services.
Progress to date
A market research report was concluded to outline the current state of diabetes care and policy in Scotland and current emerging digital technologies to support diabetes care. The project also employed a participatory process including pop-up engagements in the community, interviews with people living with type 2 diabetes and primary and secondary care health professionals, a codesign workshop with health professionals and further engagements with people living with Type 2 diabetes to refine the concepts. Rich insights were generated on how people would like to be supported at the diagnosis stage, and how primary care staff can be supported by specialist staff to create more consistent person-centred diagnosis conversations.
There were several key outputs from the project: the market review; recommendations around support for practice nurses; recommendations around diagnosis specialist group appointments, and the development of a prototype of the paper diagnosis conversation tool to support the discussion between patient and healthcare professional at the point of diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes.
Transforming the Diagnosis Conversation Resources
Next steps
Further engagement and scoping activity has taken place over the last 12 months, through DHI Simulation activity, to consider the potential digitisation of the tool prototyped in the DHI DSE. This work will be progressed through consultation with the National Diabetes group. The insights gained through this project, and the DHI's other work in diabetes, will inform future projects in this critical domain.
