A vision for Wales – a review of the Wales Network Meeting on 25 February 2016
Originally published on Wednesday 9th March 2016
42 healthcare professionals and a further 13 stakeholders attended the first all-Wales meeting of the Children and Young People’s Wales Diabetes Network (and Brecon Group) on Thursday 25 February. The event was held in the Priory Centre, Abergavenny and included an exhibition from industry partners and third sector organisations. All six health boards were represented, as were all professions involved in paediatric diabetes multi-disciplinary teams.
Dr Chris Bidder, clinical lead for the network, opened the meeting by welcoming everyone. He introduced one of the network’s videos that were launched in January and invited network members to submit ideas for future videos.
Sara Crowley introduced ‘Type 1 Hurdles’ – her story of living with diabetes since the age of 3. It was a funny, moving account of life with the condition that concluded with Sara asking all staff to remember that managing diabetes and living with diabetes are very different things. Sara also talked about her experience of going through transition services and later experiencing sight loss due to her diabetes.
All members of the network took part in the next session – an interactive discussion about the vision and values for the network. People were asked to suggest vision statements and key words to describe how the network will operate. They were also asked to list words they didn’t want to see used. A survey based on this session will soon be circulated to everyone in the network, including those who didn’t attend the session.
There were four short updates about key areas of work. Dr Chris Bidder presented an update from the Steering Group meeting in the morning, including news about the peer review quality assurance programme.
Dr Justin Warner reminded all teams that the results of the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit (NPDA) and the online patient reported experience measures (PREM), which are part of the audit. All units in Wales have now been equipped with a tablet so that patients and families can fill out the PREM in the clinic.
Dr Rebekah Pryce presented progress on the structured education programme, which has the provisional title of “Living well / Byw yn dda”. Comments and further suggestions for a course name were invited.
Finally, Dr Kamal Weerasinghe asked for input into the structure of the Annual Scientific Meeting, which will be held in October.
The final session of the day was about the proposed all-Wales out of hours service. A briefing paper had been circulated prior to the meeting, and had also been discussed in the steering group meeting. The current NICE requirement for on-call expert diabetes advice 24/7 is not being met in Wales. The briefing paper outlined five possible approaches to ensure services comply with NICE.
After some discussion, the accepted proposal was to explore setting up a paid out of hours service staffed by members of paediatric diabetes teams. A vote was held to determine whether this was worth pursuing as a network with about half of those present voting to continue developing the project further. Next steps will include a presentation to the All-Wales Diabetes Implementation Group (AWDIG), which will hopefully endorse the proposal and support a request to fund the service.
The next Wales Network Event will be examining Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) with a view to developing an all-Wales guideline to comply with NICE requirements. The provisional date for the summer meeting is WEDNESDAY 15 JUNE at the same venue.