NHS Diabetes and Kidney Care

NHS Diabetes is one part of NHS Diabetes and Kidney Care. NHS Diabetes and Kidney Care plays a vital role in improving the services and quality of care received by people with diabetes or kidney disease. Our aim is simple but crucial: to embed safe, evidence-based examples of 'what works' leading to better outcomes for patients.

Our work is focused around the three themes of the NHS Outcomes Framework - effectiveness, patient experience and safety.

We enable delivery of the NHS Outcomes Framework through effectiveness, patient experience and safety.

NHS Diabetes and Kidney Care has two main areas, NHS Diabetes and NHS Kidney Care. We also provide support to the Department of Health's NHS Health Check programme and host its website: www.dakc.nhs.uk/nhshealthcheck

Effectiveness

• Working at a national level to engineer large scale improvements to services that:
  • prevent people with diabetes or kidney disease from dying prematurely
  • enhance the quality of life for people with long term conditions
  • help patients recover following episodes of illness or injury
• Sharing evidence based practice and examples of what works so local organisations can 'do it once, do it right'
• Identifying ways to make smart use of NHS resources
• Collecting, creating and sharing information and health economic evidence to improve local decision making and support service improvement

Patient experience

• Putting patients and carers at the heart of what we do. Engaging with them to obtain their views, understand their needs and involve them in our work to ensure a positive experience of care
• Acting to reduce variations in care and health inequalities
• Developing and sustaining networks that support integration across care pathways

Safety

• Identifying gaps in knowledge and responding to these with education tools
• Providing information to help local organisations evaluate and benchmark their performance, both nationally and against their peers
• Engaging with health professionals, commissioners and managers to change behaviours to protect patients from avoidable harm
• Underpinning all that we do are effective communication and evaluation.
  
• We have the knowledge, experience, tools, guidance and evidence to do all this; and to do it well, improving lives for patients.
  

We also work with the Department of Health to support the delivery of the NHS Health Check programme. The purpose of the programme is to prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease by inviting everyone between the ages of 40 and 74, who do not already have one of these conditions, to a health check. If the health check shows that a person is at risk of developing one or more of the conditions, they can be offered the appropriate help and treatments to reduce their risk.