What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

The Southampton Diabetes project team was formed in 2019, out of a recognised need to work more collaboratively to improve health outcomes and patient experience. The team held a patient and people event in Jan 2020 in collaboration with the partnering trusts, Diabetes Research and Wellness Foundation and health care professionals working in the local area. Patients expressed the need for more information, preferably in an online format.  Information alone is not going to engage those less engaged and for that reason we have appointed a Diabetes Specialist Nurse to be focused for people with Type 1 diabetes. This online hub will provide direct access to the nurse.

Providing this online hub will meet the needs of patients and aims to reduce the number of hypo/hyperglycaemia events leading to ambulance care, A&E attendance and hospitalisation. This resource compliments our focus to reduce amputation and sight loss.

What does your project aim to achieve?

Aim: To reach out to the less engaged population with Type 1 Diabetes and support them to improve their health and well being outcomes.

Objectives:

• Provide an online resource
• Codesign content which contain local and national information and is accessible in different languages.
• Access to specialist educational group support
• Access to Diabetes Specialist Nurse in Type 1 Diabetes

How will the project be delivered?

This idea has had considerable preparatory work, although it requires additional support and funding to achieve its aims.

We have:

• gathered local figures to understand the problem.
• engaged stakeholders in our local trusts and commissioning.
• held a patient engagement event
• reached out to the local population by conventional means and gathered data for comparative purposes.
• appointed a specialist nurse to work on this project.

Our project team will be expanded to include people with lived experience. The project team will set up the online hub on an existing web-based platform to include the educational and accessible resource to the Diabetes Specialist Service. We will online hub will be promoted through our patient communication channels.

We will measure the number of contacts received as a service as a result of this initiative and compare this against the conventional approach. We will document and review clinical outcomes.

How is your project going to share learning?

The clinical issues we have outlined in our local population are not unique and are common across the country with minor variations in headline figures. Anything we learn from this project will be readily transferrable across the country.

We will enhance our existing engagement and lines of communications with engagement events to share the learning. This would include use of Blog, posters/ leaflets, social media, podcasting, local radio, CCG newsletter, diabetes transformation newsletter, short patient films, peer support outreach workers and community engagement events which are locally and nationally accessible.

Following evaluation of this project, our ambition is to write a paper for publication, share at conferences and reach out to other providers within our network and beyond, to share learning.