Workshop Australian Diabetes Society and the Australian Diabetes Educators Association Annual Scientific Meeting 2016

Can you Standardise Diabetes Education and Treatment for Children? (#146)

Deb Foskett 1 , Angela llewellyn 2
  1. Insulin Pump Angels, Helensvaletown Centre, QLD, Australia
  2. School of Health Sciences, Southern Cross University, Bilinga, Queensland, Australia

Can we extrapolate this out to rural and remote areas and what would we need to achieve?

The Aim ; To standardize diabetes management for children with type 1diabetes in remote and regional settings.

A brief outline.

In one regional hospital with no diabetes educator available we have now standardized care of the type 1 child . The ward staff attended a basic education day to upskill them with the needs of the type one child and family, use of equipment and up to date practices such as carbohydrate counting. This empowers staff and gives them confidence to help manage the children and offering advice to their families that is uniform.

The other setting was a regional hospital with diabetes educators.  Care was standardized for both newly diagnosed children and children with established diabetes who attended the paediatric clinic. This included teaching or upskilling all those children on multiple daily injections, carbohydrate counting use of carbohydrate meters and ensuring everyone had a ketone testing meters with a sick day plan. A clinical pathway was developed with the diabetes team.

 Learning objectives

  • To be able to develop a system of care in a specific demographic
  • To be able to identify the resources available
  • To understand the needs of  children and families living with type 1 diabetes
  • To think about using a standardize approach when there is no educator with in the hospital