Endocrine Abstracts

Evidence suggests that empowering patients of chronic illness with self-management skills improves the outcomes. European countries with high emphasis on diabetes self-management education report significantly better clinical outcomes. In PREM survey, few service users expressed the desire to know the results of their annual review blood results. We used this as a trigger for a project to inform service users about their annual care processes completion status. We describe the project and its progress below.

Materials and methods: We designed a standard format for an Annual Review Letter. The letter contained three pages. The opening page listed all annual care processes with explanation of each care process and its importance. The second page listed all HbA1c values of individual patient for that year with a custom colour coded HbA1c chart. This page also listed completion status/results of other care processes with individualised comments entered by a clinician. Third page suggested goals for that patient to work on in the next year of care. The content and design of the letter was reviewed by service users through Patients Relations Team and their suggestions were incorporated in final design. Generating these letters manually for all patients was felt to be time consuming and difficult considering wide variation in IT skills in our team. Therefore, a semi-automated process was developed. Data was downloaded from diabetes database in the form of three MS Excel sheets and fed into a custom developed Microsoft Excel workbook with advanced formulas to generate the letter including the graph and get it ready for comments input by clinician. This workbook can be re-used by pasting new data next year. The letters were printed in colour and sent to all patients by post. We used Microsoft Teams and Planner to coordinate and monitor the project.

Result and conclusion: The project was completed by sending out annual review letters to all patients in the service (n=143). We shall launch a survey after 2 months to seek formal feedback from patients/parents on this project. We shall evaluate impact of this project on care process completion rates in next NPDA cycle.