Integrated care and diabetes: challenges, principles and opportunities

Abstract

The delivery of care for people with diabetes is a growing challenge with rapid growth in the numbers of people affected and increases in complexity of the management of the disease with more money being spent on diabetes than ever.

The system by which diabetes care is delivered in the UK is often fragmented and involves multiple providers across primary, community and specialist services which are managed by separate organizations, driven by different priorities, outcome measures and budgets, and supported by incompatible IT systems.

To improve the fragmentation of diabetes services, integrated care has been proposed as a solution. In essence, diabetes integration is the whole health community joining in partnership to own the health outcomes of patients with diabetes in their local area. This article examines what integration means to diabetes care, ranging from generalist to specialist diabetes care, describes the five key pillars of the integration of diabetes care and summarises key data sets which can be used.