GIRFT’s metrics for diabetes on the Model Health System (MHS) have been updated and improved in response to feedback from clinical teams.
The programme’s diabetes compartment has been available on the MHS portal since 2022, featuring trust- and system-specific data for diabetes care, amputations, surgical care and other hospital-wide metrics for inpatients with diabetes.
The compartment has now been refreshed and expanded, in response to feedback from NHS colleagues at GIRFT’s gateway review visits and Further Faster meetings.
Among the changes are:
- Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) metrics split by age and also primary/secondary diagnosis
- Hypoglycaemia metrics split by age and also primary/secondary diagnosis
- A new section of lower limb angioplasty metrics
- A revamp of the metrics for amputations, to now include a comparison with patients who don’t have diabetes and new metrics such as the ratio of above or through knee amputations.
To access data for your unit, log in to https://model.nhs.uk/ and navigate to ‘acute hospital services’ > diabetes > GIRFT metrics.
Data on the MHS enables NHS trusts and systems to understand how they care for people living with diabetes while in hospital, and supports them to target improvements accordingly.
The GIRFT compartment for diabetes gives clinical teams and managers access to their data on such metrics as length of stay (LoS) for patients admitted for hypo- and hyperglycaemia, the number of patients with diabetes readmitted after surgery, or length of stay for people with diabetes who need a major amputation.
In many cases, comparative data for patients without diabetes is also provided to allow an understanding of how the presence of diabetes affects patient outcomes.
“We are proud to have such a comprehensive data set available to MHS users, and to see on our visits how that data is being used by teams to make adjustments and improvements to patient care, but we also want to evolve and develop the metrics over time to be of most use. I am grateful to our analysts, who have been key in supporting us to produce these new metrics. Our colleagues in departments across England told us which developments they’d find most helpful, and we’ve listened. I’d urge everyone working with patients living with diabetes to sign up for Model Health System and tap into this important resource.”
