Diabetes monitoring
Diabetes monitoring
Author
Introduction
The number of people with diabetes requiring blood sugar monitoring in hospital is increasing. At the same time, NHS nursing staff who undertake this monitoring are struggling with increased workload, reducing the time they can spend caring for each individual patient. The use of innovative ‘flash glucose’ digital devices for blood sugar monitoring helps to reduce this time pressure, but is currently only funded for very selected groups of outpatients in the UK – meaning those in hospital, who may be typically older and from deprived backgrounds, continue to rely on traditional finger-prick monitoring.
2021 Award
Tim Robbins (CF 2016) is a doctor specialising in diabetes within University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust. During the pandemic, he implemented the use of innovative ‘Freestyle Libre’ digital devices amongst vulnerable patients in his NHS Trust, with the support of a Covid-19 Action Fund grant. These allowed patients to monitor their own blood sugar levels, greatly reducing nursing time spent on monitoring. The project was very successful, with over 350 individual patients offered the devices and very positive feedback.
Tim has been awarded one of our Activate grants to accelerate and expand the learning from this project to a national scale, benefiting patients and nurses across all NHS hospitals. He will use the funding to evaluate the project and develop a robust health economic assessment, highlighting the economic and health benefits of this approach to other NHS Trusts. He will also create a toolkit of training materials and multilingual patient support packs, to help other Trusts to implement this approach for all their patients. Finally, he will aim to co-create a position statement supported by major national bodies regarding wider, more equitable access to innovative diabetes digital monitoring. Following dissemination of his learnings, he hopes within five years to embed this learning as the norm within UK hospitals, benefiting both patients and hard-pressed nursing teams.
Tim’s Fellowship to the USA explored patient-centred digital health.
2021 Award
Tim Robbins (CF 2016) is a doctor specialising in diabetes within University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust. During the pandemic, he implemented the use of innovative ‘Freestyle Libre’ digital devices amongst vulnerable patients in his NHS Trust, with the support of a Covid-19 Action Fund grant. These allowed patients to monitor their own blood sugar levels, greatly reducing nursing time spent on monitoring. The project was very successful, with over 350 individual patients offered the devices and very positive feedback.
Tim has been awarded one of our Activate grants to accelerate and expand the learning from this project to a national scale, benefiting patients and nurses across all NHS hospitals. He will use the funding to evaluate the project and develop a robust health economic assessment, highlighting the economic and health benefits of this approach to other NHS Trusts. He will also create a toolkit of training materials and multilingual patient support packs, to help other Trusts to implement this approach for all their patients. Finally, he will aim to co-create a position statement supported by major national bodies regarding wider, more equitable access to innovative diabetes digital monitoring. Following dissemination of his learnings, he hopes within five years to embed this learning as the norm within UK hospitals, benefiting both patients and hard-pressed nursing teams.
Tim’s Fellowship to the USA explored patient-centred digital health.