How can we help to beat diabetes?

Currently around 422 million adults worldwide have diabetes, and this number is set to more than double in the next 20 years. In the developed world, diabetes is a major public health issue and we are seeing the incidence in the UK growing year on year. The glaring rise in diabetes is impacted by a range of factors, including a dramatic rise in people becoming overweight and obese; and today's World Health Day aims to help raise awareness around preventing diabetes.

Although there is still a lot of work still to be done to step up prevention and the treatment of diabetes, access to diabetes services are improving all the time and treatments are becoming more effective. At CLCH we are proud of the developments we have made in the treatment and prevention of diabetes, but know there is still work to be done. We provide diabetes services across a number of London boroughs, and are continuing to help raise awareness and promote healthier lifestyles in the communities we work with. One of our main focusses is on improving access to our service with early morning, evening and weekend clinics available.

The focus of this year's World Health Day is beating diabetes and ensuring that ways of preventing and diagnosing it are highlighted to the public, and ensuring that appropriate care and treatment is in place for people who have diabetes.

Considerable improvements have been made in where we deliver our services from, with increasing access at General Practitioner (GP) clinics, health centres and home visits. It is critical to our care that we are offering care that is truly closer to home. 

Our diabetes teams hold a range of specialist skills and expertise, and members of the service include: diabetes specialist nurses; dieticians; specialist community matrons; and nurse consultants in diabetes. These highly skilled diabetes professionals, as well as other members of the team, target some of the harder to reach patients, such as homeless people to ensure care is offered to all. We ensure that our services are tailored to individual patient needs and we also offer culturally appropriate diabetes care and education for specific ethnic groups across the boroughs we serve.

We are seeing that diabetes prevention features increasingly in our work here. Over the years, we have developed much stronger ties with patient and community groups to help us deliver the key messages around diabetes prevention, and ensure that we help to beat diabetes in the future.

CLCH welcomes the focus of this years' World Health Day and indeed the large number of initiatives alive in the community around diabetes prevention.

By:
Sonia Wijesundare, Senior Diabetes Specialist Nurse and Team Lead (Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster Diabetes Services)
Ian Jones, Clinical Business Unit (CBU) Manager for Integrated Long Term Conditions