Dr. Carrie Mackenzie describes the experience of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital Diabetes team in delivering effective care for children and young people, overcoming the challenges posed by COVID-19.
In March 2020 the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak a pandemic and a public health emergency of international concern. The pandemic has created unprecedented difficulties in delivering diabetes care with fear of COVID-19 playing a large part in the reluctance of service users to access routine and urgent medical care.
The decision to suspend all non-essential face-to-face patient contacts was made nationally by the NHS in March 2020 with immediate effect and with no specific prior planning leaving individual clinical teams to come up with rapidly implemented innovative ways of working in order to ensure that young people and their families could still access appropriate effective care and that clinical outcomes were not adversely affected.
The Sheffield Children’s Diabetes Team were determined to find ways to ensure the best possible care to our service users during the pandemic. We were also keen to assess the effect of ‘lockdown’ on glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) which is tested routinely every three months to monitor the long-term control of diabetes mellitus.
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