“This Best Practice Guide has been created by an independent Multi-Disciplinary Team. Novo Nordisk provided sponsorship for the development and production of this guide but has had no input into the content”
Executive Summary
This Best Practice Guide details the opportunities and complexities of designing and implementing group consultations in diabetes care. The evidence and feedback from Health Care Professionals (HCPs) and People with Diabetes (PwD) to gain a 360° opinion is detailed within this Best Practice Guide as this informs decision making and key factors for your consideration of this service redevelopment.
This best practice guide has been created by a multidisciplinary team
Environmental
Feedback from the MDT group have highlighted special considerations for setting up group consultations in terms of ergonomics and environment. These considerations need attention to promote professionalism and inclusion.
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Service Delivery
This aspect has been identified as fundamental relating to whether a move to adopt group consultations in diabetes care practices is required or possible for individual diabetes services.
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HCPs Training Needs
Consideration of the training and ongoing support for conducting group consultations needs to be available for clinicians wishing to provide this service to support the organisation, provision, enablement and evaluation of group consultations in diabetes care. This also includes PwD being invited into this process (Bombard et al, 2018).
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Person with diabetes considerations
To undertake a change in routine diabetes care for PwD with long standing diabetes might be more problematic than introducing this service delivery with people more recently diagnosed. Also group consultations may be less suitable for people with type 1 diabetes potentially with specific complexities in insulin and glucose management complexities. Distinction between the difference of group education and group consultations needs careful consideration given the evidence of sub-optimal national uptake to group structured educational opportunities in type 2 diabetes across diabetes care in general (Poduval et al, 2020a) and type 1 diabetes (McDonald et al, 2021). Type 1 diabetes structured education however has improved marginally since becoming virtual (McDonald et al, 2021), however type 2 structured education virtually remains sub-optimally attended (Poduval et al, 2020b).
Feedback from HCPs and PwD about group consultations include the following considerations:
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Conclusions
Group consultations do have their place but careful consideration in the organisation especially in terms of time efficiency and sharing of education. The training of HCPs and group set ups needs careful thought and attention. This is not a one size fits all scenario and reflecting ‘No decision about me without me’ (Department of Health, 2012), the same considerations need to be applied in the PwD’s decision to potentially not engage with this service development.
Here you can download the Best Practice Guide for Group Consultations in Diabetes Care
