Endocrine Abstracts

The management of children and young people (CYP) with diabetes is forever evolving, with tools and management strategies becoming much more intense. Year on year this has led to an overwhelming burden of educating schools when providing training for over 300 patients with type 1, type 2 and rarer types of diabetes. Children spend on average 1,267.5 hours per year in school – it is essential children’s diabetes management is optimised during this time, and health care professionals must ensure their diabetes care needs are met in school. Our historical approach was to attend each school, fighting Birmingham traffic and roadwork’s taking up to 15 minutes to travel just 1 mile! A new paradigm was needed to meet the school training demand. The Diabetes Team created a bold new vision by mind mapping. The concept was to invite schools to attend a ‘school clinic’ at the diabetes centre. Six separate training slots every Monday, June to October, prioritising those new to diabetes/changing school. The training aimed to deliver comprehensive, consistent training that met the needs of school personnel and CYP diabetes. The ‘School Clinic’ approach was calculated to meet demand, and half the nursing and dietetic time required for school training. The ‘School Clinic’ approach was piloted in 2015. Findings from our first year were, schools being initially resistant to change, no consistency in paperwork and training resources and time pressure. Each year the training has been evaluated and audited by both the diabetes team and the schools. The time taken to educate all schools was halved a significant efficiency. The team is in the process of delivering their 4th successive year of this innovative approach to training schools in the management of childhood diabetes. There is now a standard operating procedure, teaching slides, equipment and standardised care plans for each type of therapy, MDI, CSII, Sensors & Libre along with exercise formulation charts. Feedback from both sets of staff is positive, and the team will continue to develop and respond to technological advances in diabetes in the future.