Diabetes services for south and west Hertfordshire 

I would definitely recommend it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it and I would recommend anybody to do it. In the nutshell, DESMOND is a structured education course for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. The idea behind DESMOND: the reason why we want people to attend the course is because it gives you a lot more knowledge and self-managing your own type 2 diabetes. The DESMOND program is a brilliant program to go on to help patients learn how to self-manage, meet other people with the same diagnosis, learn from each other and hopefully give people encouragement to better to control their diabetes. Yes I did enjoy DESMOND; I thought it was very informative I’m glad I came. It’s all in the booklets – we can look up afterwards so anything we’re not sure of I can I can check up on. So ideally we want to be attending the DESMOND education courses because it gives you a lot more information about how to self-manage your type 2 diabetes. It’s going to give you the information relating to portion sizes of carbohydrates and it’s going to help you to understand what kind of foods are causing your blood sugars to rise more often than not. There will definitely be a change of my lifestyle for absolute certainty – not just portion sizes. I’ve got a lot more information now about what I should be eating what I should be drinking how much I should be eating and the effects that these foods have on my body, so it’s going to help me greatly. The DESMOND course is usually run face to face. They run from 9:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. We do have some half day sessions and they run from 9am to around 1pm and we run these from out of Watford, St Albans, Hemel Hempstead and Borehamwood. We have some e-learning so that’s the E-DESMOND learning that you can do from home in your own time. There is a course booklet that you can use alongside this but we do encourage people to come to the face-to-face sessions. If neither of these options are suitable for you then we can arrange for a one to one with a specialist diabetes dietitian. People often feedback that DESMOND is a really great session they really enjoy the session; they do get a lot out of it when you see people in clinic after the session they often relate and refer back to the DESMOND examples. The tutors were excellent – you could not fault them.

If people were considering or contemplating, I’d say don’t doubt yourself just do it because it’s so worth it [Music]. The Daphne course is predominantly for people with type 1 diabetes although we have got people with type 2 diabetes who are sensitive to insulin also attending the course and the patients with type 1 diabetes are all on a multiple daily injections so they’re typically injecting four if not five injections of insulin per day. The main benefit of coming on a diabetes Daphne course is the ability to meet up with other people with diabetes which often people don’t have in their day-to-day life experiences. It’s a structured education program so the information that you get if you attend a course in the Hebrides would be exactly the same information as you’ll get if you attend a course in Hertfordshire. It’s quality assured research based and the information that you’re getting is up to date. What I got out of the course was seven new friends but more so than that was a far better understanding of diabetes itself. I’ve been a diabetic for a very long time and I think I thought I knew everything about it already and it was a very pleasant surprise and an eye opener that actually my knowledge was nothing like what I thought it was, and it’s really it’s really positive and it will improve your health and you’ll find out a lot more about what’s going on about yourself. We’ve yet to deliver a course where somebody will not learn something new. It’s very much about teaching people to self-manage a condition that they have for a lifetime. We’re not there to dictate, we’re there to bring along on the journey the ability of counting carbohydrates and the foods that they eat and adjusting their insulin accordance. It’s not strict, we’re not there to critique and we’re there to support any decision making they make along the way. Don’t be anxious because there is absolutely nothing to be anxious about. I have delayed coming on this course for 20 years and it is probably the biggest mistake so far of my life so I’m gonna take a lot of knowledge away with me but it was also great to live and hear of other people’s experiences from living with diabetes. So in Hertfordshire we deliver the course in three different formats: you can come for a week long you can come one day a week for five weeks or you can even do it at home remotely. I think it’s probably the best bit about my job is leading a definite course. It’s the enjoyment of seeing people grow and develop during the week for people to learn new ideas and to apply those in their day-to-day lives and you just see people blossom on the course and really understand more about their diabetes and therefore be able to live a more normal life. Thank you to the instructors they kind of made it you know. Yes you’ve got the the people around you that you’re learning with [Music] but without their advice and their input yeah they’re incredible [Music].