Month: June 2016

PITstop launches prescribing guidance

PITstop prescribing guidance is for nurses that do not prescribe (non-prescribers), non-medical prescribers and GPs supporting non-prescribers. The guidance highlights the importance of clearly defining your role in advanced diabetes care and knowing when prescribing colleagues must be involved (non-prescribers), and the importance in defining your scope of prescribing practice with diabetes-related medication (non-medical prescribers). The RCN are not planning to write any guidance on this and plan to provide links to recognised guidance from experts in the field, as it is published. The main PITstop messages are relevant to any primary care clinician, but the focus is for PITstop-trained clinicians to use the PITstop resources, including the insulin and GLP-1 care pathways and the general rules, alongside local and NICE guidelines.

The guidance, in our student folder and available to download from the website, evolved in response to an email last year from Sharon Lee, Primary Care Workforce Facilitator for South Kent Coast clinical commissioning group, which highlighted the issue.

Bespoke CPD becomes part of annual diabetes training programmes

This year sees the launch of half and one-day Continuing Professional Development (CPD) PrePITstop and PITstop courses in response to primary care workforces’ focus on CPD events. Our PrePITstop CPD programme is suitable for students who have attended a Foundation level course and have chosen to continue to deliver essential diabetes care to a high standard and not progress to insulin and GLP-1 initiation. The PITstop CPD is for those who have already attended PITstop.

Bexley in South London has commissioned CPD one-day courses from Anne for the past four years, as well as continuing to run PrePITstop courses for newcomers and GP registrars, and accessing the national PITstop course in Kent. So we were able to use our experience in Bexley to write the 2016 CPD programmes.

Experience our one day PrePITstop course

For those unable to spend three-days on the course, there is now the one-day PrePITstop key message course, which delivers all the key messages from the three-day course in a one-day programme. It’s hard work and a lot to grasp, but has been commissioned in Hillingdon and Sandwell & West Birmingham and received extremely well.

In order to register for a PITstop course, you ideally need to have attended a Foundation course beforehand and have a decent grasp of essential diabetes services and patient care: diagnosis, structuring diabetes services using a practice diabetes team approach, lifestyle changes, oral diabetes medication, screening, prevention and treatment for diabetes-related complications.

Our three-day PrePITstop course remains the gold standard and is recommended especially for GPs and Practice Nurses relatively new to supporting people with diabetes.

But our initial courses demonstrated that attendees felt there was more than enough value in the shorter format.