The Diabetes in Pregnancy Midwifery service has 10 Midwives and 2 Community Health Workers , supported by a Clinical Midwife Manager. In 2024 the team provided care for over 1200 women. 900 with GDM, 301 with Type 2 diabetes and 16 women with Type 1 diabetes. Around 70 women lost out on care due to late referral and/or inability to engage them in care. A key enabler of access to care is that our midwifery team provide full midwifery care as well as specialist diabetes input when women have another maternity carer.
Recognising that clients experience barriers to engagement in diabetes in pregnancy care, we developed our pathway to address the health inequities, encourage engagement, and improve outcomes for women and babies.
Our care pathway starts at point of referral to our service. We have implemented timely processing of referral, we contact women within 48 hrs to introduce our service and engage them in diabetes in pregnancy care. We have various ways of initiating treatment plans that do not require the women to attend a physical clinic appointment. Community health workers in the team will drop off equipment and can assist women with meter teaching. Midwives offer home visits, telehealth options as well as community based local clinic appointments.
Our key innovations to improving care includes;
Diverse methods of giving information : on-line sessions. telehealth, video links, group sessions
Multi cultural team
Financial support for Ultrasound and transport
Social work service
Focused postnatal follow-up
Positively reactive opportunistic care delivery