We're celebrating another finalist at HSJ finals... what a year it's turning out to be!

This time it's the HSJ Value awards and our new Diabetes Inpatient Specialist Nurse service is pioneering safer care and preventing incidents.

Here Lead Diabetes Specialist Nurse, Ani Kumar, explains more:   

How are things better for our patients?

Many reasons. The advantages for our patients are numerous. It's a seven-day a week service, it's a proactive in-reach service and leads to early discharge from A&E. It also reduces bed pressures by ensuring that patients with Diabetes are recognised earlier during their inpatient spell.  It has reduced Length of Stay and has led to improved feedback and satisfaction for patients during in-patient stay.

How good is the teamwork?

Demonstrates leadership, communication and excellent collaboration and success of the team is closely tied with the culture within our organisation.

How effective is the new team?

We now have a great deal of evidence suggesting that a Diabetes Inpatient Specialist Nurse (DISN) service, leads to improved outcomes including reduced length of stay, reduced prescription errors, increased patient satisfaction and reduced admission rates. This model is cost effective as an investment to save strategy in terms of reduced bed occupancy. From this project it is very clear that savings from introduction of these teams can substantially outweigh the cost of introducing this team.

How does technology support this new way of working?

Proactive in- reach that allows us to identify any potential incidents from happening

How many inpatients stay reduced and is there a saving in this over two years?

- The current annual savings in 18/19 compared to 16/17 are £381k before the cost of the DISN team.

- Re-admissions have reduced  by more than 10%. Down from 18.1% in 16/17 to 7.8%, which is lower than the Trust average of 15.7% in 18/19.

- Reduction of Hypoglycaemia incidents requiring injectable intervention from ~5/month in April 2018 to ~2/month in October 2019

- Elimination of inpatient Diabetic Ketoacidosis (DKAs)  - in April 2018 there were approximately three  DKAs/month, however no inpatient DKAs have been reported since February 2019. 

- An average further LOS improvement of 0.4 days for all patients admitted who have a diagnosis of Diabetes compared to the Trust’s current rate of reduction.