Novo Nordisk has teamed up with several NHS hospitals and a university in South London to provide an integrated care service for people with diabetes.
The company will work with King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts – collectively known as King’s Health Partners – to develop a new model of specialist diabetes care in one of the most deprived parts of the UK.
Known as i3-diabetes, Novo said the five-year programme is a response to the changing role of diabetes care and will aim to integrate specialist services with community and primary care.
The programme, which is thought to be the first of its kind in the UK, has its foundations in a 2012 collaboration between King’s Health and Novo that focused on understanding the needs of people with diabetes in South London and developing data around current diabetes care services.
Now the two organisations are ready to use this information in a practical way to develop two new approaches to change the way King’s Health Partners delivers its care.
The first of these approaches covers improved care co-ordination, which will bring patients and specialists together to understand how healthcare staff can better support patients with complex needs and develop multiple interventions to improve patient experience.
The second approach aims to develop a more personalised approach to care, assessing the individual needs beyond the clinical diagnosis. This includes tailoring care based on a patient’s psychosocial, physiological, medical and social needs.
Peter Meeus, Novo’s managing director for the UK, told PMLiVE the collaboration was an example of a sustainable way to provide innovation and improvement in patient care as healthcare systems face financial challenges.
“Cost-containment in the NHS shouldn’t be at the expense of patient care,” said Meeus. “There are different and new ways we can look at.”
He also explained that the company will be takeing a very hands-on role in the partnership, with both Novo and King’s Health Partners contributing resources and respective expertise in diabetes to develop the approaches outlined in the programme.
The location was also important for Novo, with Meeus explaining that King’s Health partners covered a diabetes population of 90,000 people covering wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, meaning relevant data samples could be collated.
The programme’s potential goes beyond south London, however, and Meeus said he was keen to “spread best practice and export learnings” from the partnership to other parts of the UK as well as other countries.