Diabetes is a serious illness requiring regular follow-up. We can provide most of your care within the practice, but we also use specialist teams provided by local hospitals when appropriate.

As part of the routine care we recommend twice yearly checks with the doctor, and practice nurses. More frequent appointments may be required to help you manage co-existing diseases  impacting on your diabetes.

Hospital-based diabetic clinics are moving away from full annual checks to a problem-solving approach. We hope all the tests and examinations required to give you the best possible care will be done by the hospital when you go there. To make sure this happens we like to see all diabetics, under hospital care, at least once a year at the surgery. The doctor will discuss this with you if necessary.

There is lots of helpful information at the Diabetes UK website about what care to expect. If you feel you are seeing too many doctors and nurses please discuss this at you r next appointment.

At each diabetes check:

1. You will need a blood tests so we can monitor your kidney function, liver function and HbA1c (a measure of diabetes control) twice a year. Once a year we recommend you have a fasting blood sample to check your cholesterol levels and also send a urine sample to the laboratory to check for albumin.

2. We recomend a 20 minute appointment with the practice nurse for a physical examination. Currently Ruth Raudsepp is our diabetic lead nurse and she is happy to discuss aspects of your diabetes.

3. Once the blood results and physical examination results are available you should see Dr Morgan for twenty minutes. He has a special interest in diabetes as well as having Type 1 diabetes himself. Although we recommend seeing Dr Morgan, any of the surgery doctors are happy to review your condition.

4. If necessary we can refer you to many different diabetes centres  based in hospital for more specialist advice and care.  The most commonly used centres are based in Salisbury, Bournemouth and Poole.