The DESMOND (Diabetes Education and Self Management
for Ongoing and Newly Diagnosed) Training and Quality
Development (TQD) programme is a recent initiative in
health care professional training. The TQD programme was
originally developed by a task group of the DESMOND
Collaborative to support the clinical trial of DESMOND. In
less than four years it has grown into a unique example of
how successful, multidisciplinary, multi-organisational
working can transcend traditional barriers to create
innovative and effective services.
The aim of the TQD project was to develop a national
training team with could successfully develop training
which engages educators in behaviour change, develop a
mentoring and assessment process supporting educators to
deliver DESMOND in a non-didactic and facilitative style, to
assess educator delivery in an effective and non-subjective
manner and to develop a mechanism to capture data for
analysis. A key element to success has been the strong and
focused leadership displayed by the Training Strategy
Group who have led on practical succession planning to
enable individuals to progress from the ranks of educators
to take up greater levels of responsibility.
The current 28 trainers and 430 educators across the UK
regularly report on the relevance of their DESMOND
training to clinical practice, for example, one-to-one
consultations with patients and communicating with and
training colleagues and clinical teams. For patients, it
provides confidence that the organisation and individuals
facilitating their diabetes education experience are of a
guaranteed quality.
The team’s patient champion says: “Now I manage my
diabetes on a day-to-day basis by setting goals and
monitoring my progress. I learned to experiment with
different foods and know how to eat. Education has given
me confidence that if I go off the rails, I know how to get
back on track. I eat far more healthily now, the way I
should have eaten years ago. Has education helped? I’ll
let you decide!”
For more information on this project, please contact:
marian.carey@uhl-tr.nhs.uk
