Improving inpatient care
We work closely with other organisations, healthcare professionals and people living with diabetes to improve inpatient care. You can find out more and access useful guidance and resources below.
Over the last two decades we’ve seen great improvements in diabetes inpatient care. However, we still hear that people living with diabetes feel unsafe in hospital and it's not hard to understand why. Data from the National Diabetes Inpatient Audit in 2019 showed that:
- Nearly one in three drug charts for people with diabetes had at least one medication error.
- Over a third (35%) of people with diabetes in hospital are treated with insulin, and of those, almost two fifths had at least one insulin error on their drug chart.
- On the day of the audit, 3.6% of people in hospital with type 1 diabetes had developed a hospital-acquired diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition.
We can and must do better for people with diabetes in hospital.
Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT)
GIRFT is a national programme designed to improve quality of care within the NHS. The diabetes workstream has a variety of data-led resources, tools and guidance to support people with diabetes and healthcare professionals improve care and reduce harm.
JBDS Inpatient Care Guidelines
The Joint British Diabetes Societies for Inpatient Care (JBDS-IP) aims to improve inpatient diabetes care across the UK through the development and use of high-quality, evidence-based guidelines and inpatient care pathways.
Diabetes Care Accreditation Programme (DCAP)
Led by the Royal College of Physicians and supported by us, DCAP is the accreditation programme for adult diabetes inpatient services across the UK. It sets the standards for hospital care and measures how services perform against these.
Making hospitals safe for people with diabetes: four years on
In 2018, our report Making hospitals safe shone a much-needed spotlight on diabetes inpatient care and created momentum in the field. Our recent survey has given us insight into the challenges faced by hospitals delivering diabetes care and key areas of need.
Find out the latest guidance on supporting inpatient diabetes care from the National Inpatient Diabetes COVID19 Response Team.
Watch Phil and Lesley's videos to find out why we are working with hospitals to improve care for people with diabetes.
Improving inpatient care is a Diabetes UK project and is kindly supported by funding from Sanofi. There is no involvement or influence in conceptualisation or delivery.
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