Access to inpatient diabetes resources: hospital characteristics from the inaugural Queensland Inpatient Diabetes Survey

Background Diabetes is common in hospitalised patients and despite this inpatient diabetes care in Queensland has not had large scale benchmarking or audit. Aims To establish the prevalence of diabetes in Queensland hospitals and assess the availability of specialised diabetes staff, educational res...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Internal medicine journal 2022-11, Vol.52 (11), p.1950-1956
Main Authors: Eccles‐Smith, Jade, Puri, Gaurav, Hinton, Nicola, Cutmore, Clare, Porter, Kerry, Dermedgoglou, Alexis, Donovan, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Diabetes
Diabetes mellitus
hospitalisation
Hospitals
inpatient
Patients
policy
reference standard
workforce
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Summary:Background Diabetes is common in hospitalised patients and despite this inpatient diabetes care in Queensland has not had large scale benchmarking or audit. Aims To establish the prevalence of diabetes in Queensland hospitals and assess the availability of specialised diabetes staff, educational resources and policies for inpatient diabetes management, including assessing equity of access to these resources. Methods The hospital capacity, prevalence of diabetes, diabetes‐related resources and the availability of diabetes‐related guidelines were assessed in 25 hospitals medical, surgical, mental health, high‐dependency and intensive care wards across Queensland. Dedicated diabetes staffing measured in full‐time equivalents (FTE), care delivery resources, access to educational resources, standard policies and procedures for care were assessed. Results Twenty‐five hospitals included 4265 occupied beds. The median prevalence of diabetes was 22.9% (interquartile range (IQR) 17.3–28.5%) with an average 2.9 FTE per 100 patients with diabetes (IQR 0–6.3). There was difficulty in accessing a diabetes educator in 48% (n = 12), diabetes specialist in 44% (n = 11), orthopaedic surgeon in 48% (n = 12), podiatrist in 58% (n = 14) and vascular surgeon in 64% (n = 16) of hospitals. Small hospitals had more difficulty accessing all members of the diabetes team compared with large hospitals including credentialled diabetes educators 33% (n = 4) versus 62% (n = 8) (P 
ISSN:1444-0903
1445-5994
DOI:10.1111/imj.15433