ABCD welcomes the publication of the final GIRFT report for Diabetes, which was released on world Diabetes Day. ABCD has been fully supportive of the primary aims of the GIRFT workstream, namely to improve quality of diabetes care in hospitals, and reducing unwanted variations in clinical services and practices. For the first time, the report focussed on three main areas of care: type 1 diabetes care including transition from paediatric to adult care, in-patient diabetes services, and diabetes foot care services. The work, which started in 2017 and included more than 100 hospital visits, has been an enormous challenge to complete and ABCD wishes to thank the GIRFT leads in this area, Professors Gerry Rayman and Partha Kar, for their leadership and dedication.
It is obvious that the NHS needs to get better at sharing cost effective, best practice so that specialists can compare their own practice and make improvements where needed. This report represents a step forward in this aspiration. ABCD urges all specialist clinicians, including our members, to make use of the recommendations in this report to help make the case for investment in Diabetes services. Service users should be able to use such a report to help make better informed choices with regards to their specialist care provider.
At a time where the nation is gripped by the COVID-19 second wave of Pandemic, this report is even more important in highlighting the crucial importance of the need for In-patient diabetes services, given one third of hospitalised patients who died of COVID-19 related illness, during the first wave, had Diabetes.
We appear to be on the cusp of a more advanced era for diabetes care – rapid pace of development of technologies, evolution of the NDA to benchmark and help reduce variation, and potential extension of BPT for young people with type 1 diabetes. The publication of GIRFT diabetes report is, therefore, welcomed and timely. ABCD would like to see that the recommendations of this landmark report are implemented without significant delay to improve diabetes care in England. Local leadership and a joint working among Acute Trusts, CCGs, STPs, service users and other stakeholders will be key.
Dr Dinesh Nagi
Honorary Consultant in Diabetes and Endocrinology
Ex-Officio (Chairman) of ABCD
