Our service

We will work in line with GIRFEC (‘Getting it right for every child’) principles, ensuring that your child is at the centre of all decisions. We also recognise the important role that family doctors, nurses, teachers, social care and carers play in providing holistic care for young people and their families.

From diagnosis, we will:

• Work in a collaborative manner, always respecting you and your child’s views.
• Never forget that this is a challenging time - we will provide extra help when needed.
• Make you feel part of the team and fully explain how we can help.
• Assist you in starting insulin therapy helping you to understand how it works and how to do it.
• Educate you on how to use your meter and fully explain what all the numbers mean.
• Help you think about how diabetes will fit in with your normal family life.

After you go home, we will:

• Be in contact with you regularly over the initial days following diagnosis.
• Continue to deliver our training package either at home or in a clinical setting.
• Introduce you to peer groups and family support if acceptable to you.
• Understand that you may need to take time off work and will be supportive in this.
• Collaborate with schools so that they know how to help and support.

In the long term, we will:

• Encourage and support you to become an expert on living with diabetes.
• Deliver advice and support in a way that is inspiring and helpful.
• Work in a collaborative way to enhance overall life skills.
• Keep in contact with you using traditional clinics as well as phone, text messaging, email and other tools to develop your skills and help you to find solutions to challenges that arise.
• Keep you updated with new innovations in care.
• Ensure that we check for long term complications according to published guidelines.

We will do this by providing:

• Regular reviews of diabetes care.
• Annual reviews and motivational goal setting.
• A range of ways to access specialist advice. This includes: telephone: email; social media; web based support; and video conferencing.
• Access to personal information where available.
• Partnership working with education.
• Provide specialist psychology support when appropriate.

We will work with your family doctor to ensure that you have:

• Prescriptions for requisite supplies, provided at diagnosis and updated as required.
• Improved general health and wellbeing through diabetes specific information sharing.
• When things are difficult we will:
• Ensure ease of access with the local Paediatric team to ensure rapid access to treatment.
• Enable all health care practitioners to have easy access to our guidelines and information to help manage any problems that may arise.

What we ask of you:

• Regular attendance at clinic appointments.
• Engagement with our diabetes education programmes.
• Share your diabetes data with us so that together we can make the best and safest decisions about your treatment.
• Use your diabetes technology to get the best out of it for your diabetes.
• Let the DOT team know if you notice that changes to your treatment are needed.
• Provide feedback on your experience of our service whenever you feel this is needed.

1. DOT Tayside will review all children and young people with newly diagnosed diabetes within the next working day.
2. DOT Tayside will provide a structured training programme for each young person with diabetes. Young people and families will be offered at least one annual session with the dot.Tayside dietitian.
3. DOT Tayside will provide four sessions per year with the MDT including an annual review.
4. DOT Tayside will offer four HbA1c measurements per year.
5. DOT Tayside will work with children, young people and families to develop appropriate access across the whole system (email, social media, SMS and internet).
6. DOT Tayside will engage in regional and national benchmarking and will be an active member of the NHS Tayside Managed Clinical Network
7. DOT Tayside will ensure you have 24 hour access to expert advice for emergency situations.
8. DOT Tayside will work closely with the Adult Diabetes service team to ensure that moving to adult services is a smooth process.
9. DOT Tayside will follow existing clinical, operational and child protection guidelines and will seek to develop and implement new guidelines as appropriate.
10. DOT Tayside will continuously strive to improve the quality of the service that we deliver.