What is DESMOND?
The DESMOND Programme (Diabetes Education Self Management Ongoing and Newly Diagnosed) has been developed to help people better manage their type-2 diabetes.

DESMOND-Newly Diagnosed was developed first to help people just diagnosed with type-2 diabetes develop the skills to self-manage their condition. This education programme was subject to a randomised controlled trial (details of which can be found here).

What is DESMOND-Ongoing?
The team at CLAHRC-SY (led by Professor Simon Heller) in collaboration with colleagues in LNR-CLAHRC (led by Professor Melanie Davies) are now developing and trialling a new care package called DESMOND-Ongoing for people with established type-2 diabetes.

The DESMOND-Ongoing package will include:
• An ongoing group education intervention for patients (and family) including topics on diet, foot care, exercise, and managing hypoglycaemic attacks.
• Delivering an annual review of care by GPs and Practice Nurses using the DESMOND philosophy.

The Service Development Work
We are currently undertaking a Service Development project to check that the DESMOND-Ongoing package is acceptable to patients with type-2 diabetes, DESMOND Educators, and Primary Care staff (GPs and Practice Nurses).

The Trial
Once the Service Development work is complete, we plan to undertake a cluster randomised controlled trial to compare the effectiveness of DESMOND-ongoing to standard care in people with established type-2 diabetes. The primary outcome will be change in HbA1c with secondary outcome measures including quality of life, level of activity etc.

The Trial will commence during 2010 and we hope to have the results by 2013.

The trial will involve GP Practices and DESMOND Educators from within South Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Northampton. We hope that 19 GP practices will participate. As this is a new intervention we will deliver training to DESMOND Educators in the delivery of DESMOND-Ongoing and to GPs and Practice Nurses in delivering the annual review of care.

If you are a member of GP Practice or a DESMOND Educator and would like to get involved in the delivery of the intervention for the study, please contact Dr Clare Gibson