A MESSAGE FROM THE PAEDIATRIC DIABETES SERVICE The Paediatric Diabetes Service has seen another successful year in 2021 and are looking forward to exciting projects in 2022. Dr David Lawrenson said that the COVID pandemic triggered numerous difficulties for the Service. Despite this, with the use of Virtual Clinics and access to digital data, we managed to maintain contact with our patients, and assist them in managing their diabetes. It is great to be doing face to face clinics again, knowing that staff, parents and children have been vaccinated against COVID. 2021 saw further growth in the use of new technology to support children and young people to manage their diabetes. Building on the initiation of insulin pump therapy in 2020, we started 6 further children on insulin pumps, bringing the number of children on pumps to 12 at the end of 2021. We intend to initiate at least 6 further patients on pump therapy in 2022, hopefully more. All of our patients are using some form of continuous glucose monitoring, either CGM or Flash monitoring systems. Dr Lawrenson said that in November 2021 Celia Devlin, Paediatric Diabetes Specialist Nurse, was recruited to the team. She joined the team officially in February 2022. She brings with her knowledge, skill and enthusiasm, and she is already proving to be a valuable member of the team. We wish her good luck and a long career with the team. We are now fortunate to have two full time Paediatric Diabetes Nurse Specialists, an enormous resource for the Island. Unfortunately we have not managed to improve access to Psychology for young people with diabetes, but we have identified this as a priority for future service development. Dr Lawrenson said the department continue to monitor their performance through audit. Previous audit highlighted that a systems error meant that not all young people were undergoing foot screening. We have addressed this issue and are pleased to say that the repeat audit shows that this has improved dramatically. The audit also shows that we continue to achieve good results in terms of measures of diabetes control. Unfortunately we do not have UK data to compare ourselves to, as the COVID crisis prevented audit in England and Wales in 2020 and 2021, but the audit does show ongoing good overall diabetes control for children in Jersey. The data for HbA1c levels for children meeting HbA1c targets for 2019-2021 is presented in the graph opposite. Dr Lawrenson finished in thanking Diabetes Jersey once again for their ongoing support, allowing the Paediatric Diabetes Service to deliver services to our patients that would otherwise not have been possible. With your help we have been able to be early adopters of new technologies in diabetes management. In terms of access to technology, children with diabetes in Jersey are receiving treatment packages that are at the forefront of treatments available in the UK and Europe.
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