Improve your diabetes services

We have been helping Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust to understand their population, in order to make their diabetes prevention and treatment programmes more effective and improve health outcomes for people in the local community.

Diabetes outreach

When the diabetes team was undertaking a service review, the Trust used their tool to map the region according to disease prevalence and population demographics. They cross referenced the information they gained from this to census data about areas which didn’t have English as a first language, enabling the outreach team to know when their clinics would benefit from literature in alternative languages or interpreters. This has increased the effectiveness of the team’s work, and ensured that diabetes services will be accessible for local populations.

The team also looked at diabetes prevention, this time using the tool to focus in on areas with high risk factors for diabetes, such as obesity. This allowed them to propose targets for the System ‘health bus’ visits to places where people would be less likely to attend clinics, even down to choosing to visit one supermarket over another due to the demographics of its shoppers.

Helen Jones, Business Intelligence Lead at Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust, said: “As well as improving health outcomes, using [Strata] for this project allowed me to demonstrate to our clinicians how it’s essential that they look at populations before planning any outreach work. Now they are fully aware of the populations we have in the area, and they will proactively think about the best areas to target before starting a campaign, leading to more efficient, better directed campaigns and improved outcomes.”

Preventing complications

Shropshire is one of the worse performing counties for amputations from diabetes, so the Trust wanted to improve access to podiatry clinics to try and prevent foot and lower leg complications, or treat them before they become too serious. They were able to use the tool’s QOF data to find the prevalence of diabetes, comparing this to surgery list size to calculate numbers of patients affected. They then cross referenced this with the location of podiatry clinics, adding car ownership levels and public transport routes to estimate the reach of clinics. This allowed them to better plan clinic locations to ensure those in need of the services can easily reach them.

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