In honour of Diabetes Awareness Week, we sat down with our first DCAP level 1 accredited service, St Helens and Whiston. Janet Cardwell, a diabetes nurse consultant at the service, spoke about their experience of DCAP and how their service has benefitted from it. 

How did the accreditation process benefit your service? Were there any unintended benefits?

OK, so I think there’s the obvious benefits that accreditation provides – the assurance and greater confidence that you have in your service. But I think personally, for us, the DCAP process helped to bring together the members of the inpatient team. It gave us a platform and a driver to work towards change. To identify any gaps in our service, we looked at things like perioperative care, self-management policies, systems and processes, and without the DCAP platform behind us it wouldn’t have been as easy to drive those changes. It also helped the team to better understand the roles of our other colleagues and AHPs in inpatient care because we had to link in more with dietetics, podiatry etc to get a greater understanding. This enabled those teams to work better together – we know who to refer to, and it’s joined everyone up together. We were lucky as we already had quite a well-established inpatient team and a 7-day service; positively, DCAP made us realise we were doing well. For services that have limited staffing and don’t have policies and guidelines, DCAP is a good way to bring those issues to the forefront and to the attention of managers, as it acts as a driver to make these changes.

How did you keep your team on track and motivated?

It’s hard – it’s important from the start to make time and to have it as a priority on your agenda. You need to have regular meetings, otherwise you will lose your motivation. I think having good leadership that drives the project from the top is important – you need this embedded within your team. Keep your staff involved and updated on progress, remembering that accreditation is a supportive process, it’s there to help improve your team and it’s in the best interests of the service to work on achieving the standards. If you’re struggling, you can always reach out to the DCAP operational team.

How did the team feel when they were awarded accreditation? What does it mean to you?

The team were delighted to achieve accreditation and receive positive feedback. NHS inpatient care is open to a lot of criticism at the moment, so when I spoke to the other diabetes inpatient specialist nurses (DISNs), they all said how lovely it was to have recognition from an outside source. It was also reassuring for the team that they are providing good-quality care. As a line manager, it’s great to achieve accreditation and to receive that assurance and confidence, but more importantly, the team felt appreciated and valued. This goes toward boosting team morale and a well-functioning team.

What did you find challenging about the process?

When we first signed up for DCAP, it was overwhelming before we realised that we had a lot of the evidence already – it was just a case of adapting documents to fit the requirements. It took us a few months before we started working on our evidence upload (everybody was expecting someone else to lead the project). Initially I found that there were too many people working on the evidence upload, so I would recommend that services delegate different responsibilities among staff, otherwise there can be duplication of work. Time was also the biggest challenge; you’ve got to be organised and get buy-in from team members, so everyone is clear that this is a priority.

What advice or top tips would you give other services on their accreditation journey?

• Need to be organised and complete your self-assessment, come up with an action plan.
• Designate a coordinator/lead for each section; you cannot do this on your own, so share workload otherwise it will be overwhelming.
• Keep staff motivated by involving them.
• Make a central system for your evidence to be collected that everyone can access.
• If you are falling behind, speak to the DCAP team for support.
• Read guidance documentation available on the DCAP resource library.
  

For registration details and to find out how your service can get involved, click here.