Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic prevented face-to-face school diabetes training in 2020/2021 at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital. Moving school training online was the only viable option to ensure children with type 1 diabetes could attend school.

Objectives: 1. Develop an online school training package with competency assessment for all diabetes devices 2. Audit the number of staff competent and the cost and acceptability of the training package.

Methodology: Step 1: Over fifty multi-media interactive PDF care plans covering all devices were created, allowing personalisation upon entering age, weight and preferred hypo treatment using JavaScript coding. Each care plan had at least ten short videos embedded summarising the teaching. Each care plan had a google form competency questionnaire allowing self-assessment where 80% was the minimum pass mark Step 2: The new care plans were populated and sent to the schools with email instructions. Step 3: Compare the number of competent school staff and service cost of face-to-face training from September 2019 to March 2020 (F2F) vs online training from September 2020 to March 2021 (ONLINE). Also, the acceptability of online training.

Results: Total number of school staff trained and competent for F2F was 300 vs 375 for ONLINE, a 25% increase. Total service cost (health care professional time, room hire, material generation, admin, telephone queries) for F2F was £10,050 vs £4,290 for ONLINE, a 58% cost reduction. The principal saving was 190 fewer hours of nurse/dietitian time (£20 per hour) required to train school staff, a £3,800 saving. Qualitative feedback from school staff showed 1) training time remained at two and half hours, but travel time reduced by over an hour 2) videos enabled self-paced learning and re-visiting essential teaching at the time of need 3) no limits on staff to be trained 4) Competency assessment provided re-assurance.

Conclusion: Moving school training online reduced the service cost by over half whilst training 25% more school staff. Multi-media interactive school care plans allow self-paced learning and re-visiting videos at the time of need. Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital Diabetes Team plan to keep school training online.