The work of a dedicated inpatient diabetes care team in a district general hospital

Abstract

We describe the work of a multidisciplinary inpatient diabetes care team in a 400 bed district general hospital over a four-year period. Also included are some observations on a positive contribution to reduced length of stay for people with diabetes in hospital, and low incidences of prescription and management errors in the first National Diabetes Inpatient Audit in 2009. Specifically between 2005 and 2007 the average length of stay in days for all patients whose diagnosis included diabetes fell from 9.39 to 3.76 days despite the total number of patients increasing from 507 to 633 over the same quarter each year. The inpatient team provided almost 1000 visits to patients with diabetes in the first six months of each year 2008 and 2009, and at the first National Diabetes Inpatient Audit had only 5% prescription errors and 3% management errors (versus 19% and 14% respectively nationally) with 100% appropriate blood glucose testing. We suggest that a dedicated inpatient diabetes care team raises the quality of care for patients and enhances patient and professional education; we also suggest that audit standards should be developed for inpatient diabetes care and assessed in future national audits. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons.