Announcing the National Diabetes Prevention Programme

In a few weeks we’ll be launching a new programme aimed at reducing the prevalence of diabetes in Birmingham.

Pre-diabetes, and the prevention of Type 2 Diabetes, is something that we’ve had on our radar for a long time.

As we wrote in June (see Pre-diabetes: preventing diabetes with a healthy diet) our Health Trainers are already helping people to reduce the likelihood of a diabetes diagnosis by providing the skills and support to make lifestyle changes, and we have been looking for a way to expand on this knowledge and formalise it for a while.

So from October we’ll be working alongside Birmingham South and Central CCG and their GPs to help deliver the National NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme.

The national programme, which is a joint initiative between NHS England, Public Health England (PHE) and Diabetes UK, aims to significantly reduce the four million people in England otherwise expected to have Type 2 diabetes by 2025.

How will it work?

The diagnosis for Type 2 Diabetes is life changing. For those who are at risk, the diagnosis of Pre Diabetes is a warning sign, and from now on when GPs make this diagnosis, they will be able to refer patients to the new service. We will be sharing this work with Health Exchange so some practices will work with us and some with them.

So this is how we plan for it to work.  Patients will be invited to attend a course, it will start intensively, so meeting every week for the first six weeks, then there will be monthly monitoring.  All in all there will be support for at least 9 months.

The sessions will be interactive, practical and we hope fun. The facilitators will be skilled, experienced, friendly and enthusiastic which we think is the formula we need to encourage and motivate attendees.

Attendees will be equipped with skills, information and tools that can help delay or even prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes.

We’re really pleased to have this opportunity to run this programme in South Birmingham. We already work closely with South Birmingham GP’s via our Health Trainer Services. And we know that this kind of support – a personalised, intensive lifestyle change intervention can work really well.

We are looking forward to helping even more people across the city to improve their health.  For more details contact Michelle Bluck michelle.bluck@gatewayfs.org or telephone 0121 456 7820.