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Date of release: 15th November 2024
Diabetes Centre is £1,000 prize winner
Wolverhampton’s Diabetes Centre has received a £1,000 boost after an IT team generously donated its national award prize money.
The Software Development Team at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) won the Evolve Project of the Year Award in NDL’s Community Awards for developing a diabetes podiatry system tool.
Diabetes can reduce the blood supply to feet and cause a loss of feeling. These problems can lead to ulcers and infections.
The replacement tool screens data from some 100,000 patients across Wolverhampton, Walsall and South Staffordshire from GPs and Pathology as well as retinas so the condition can be identified quicker in those who might be more susceptible to it.
It also provides a full summary care record to manage all identified Diabetes and Podiatry patients on an ongoing basis.
This includes referrals, test requests recording medications, observations (BMI etc) and diagnoses (e.g. Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes) data. It integrates with Pathology retinal and regional data sets to provide users with the care record. This is also able to show key data visually, using historical trend graphs for each metric, such as height, weight and cholesterol.
Both the Software Development Team and the Diabetes Centre – which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary – are based at New Cross Hospital.
And it was a real example of cross-team working over two years, with the Software Development Team liaising closely with Professor Baldev Singh, Consultant in Diabetes and Endocrinology at RWT.
Richard Hough, who leads the 10-strong team as Software Development Manager at RWT, said: “We were delighted to win this award, and it only seemed fair and right to donate it to our own Diabetes Centre, so diabetes patients can benefit.
“Prof. Singh was very involved in helping to design the tool, and through close dealings with him over time we have become aware of how big a problem diabetes is in this region.
“A lot of people don’t know they have diabetes and this tool should identify patients with the condition quicker.”
Based in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, NDL is a national company which enables digital transformation across the public sector.
Declan Grogan, Chief Executive Officer of NDL, said: “To create something that is so helpful to patient research is both very impressive and very rewarding.
“Congratulations and well done on this fantastic achievement.”
Amie Rogers, Fundraising and Lead Digital Engagement Officer from The RWT Charity, said: “Well done to the Software Development Team for its innovation. It’s great to see diabetes patients benefitting from the prize too.”