Quality Standards for Diabetes Care Toolkit

Implementation examples / innovations

Gestational diabetes

Diabetes Projects Trust

The Diabetes Projects Trust (DPT) was originally called the ‘South Auckland Diabetes Project’, and in 2013 they celebrated 21 years of delivering services focused on preventing diabetes and its complications. The Diabetes Projects Trust emphasises partnership with the community to achieve better health for present and for future generations. The DPT has a focus on prevention, health promotion, empowerment, quality improvement support, and research and delivers a number of programmes that achieve these aims.
The DPT Gestational Diabetes Mellitus project focuses on reducing the impact of GDM on mother and child. At the moment, there are a number of projects under way, for example looking at ways of encouraging early screening for the development of type 2 diabetes, promoting early antenatal care of mothers in subsequent pregnancies, and supporting mothers and families to adopt health behaviours that reduce the risk of future type 2 diabetes and poor health outcomes. Work is under way on a GDM diabetes registry.
The GDM Registry is a collaborative effort with funding from Counties Manukau District Health Board (CMDHB) and Diabetes Projects Trust. The Registry collects together a key subset of information about women who have had GDM in their pregnancy. This information is held in a confidential database that will be used primarily to help improve follow-up and future care. The Registry is to be linked to other data sources and will continuously receive updates, such as HbA1c results, to enable timely prompts and send out annual screening reminders over the longer term. Future positive pregnancy testing will result in a prompt to the primary carer regarding GDM history. The Registry will also allow contact to be made directly with the woman regarding relevant lifestyle interventions and health promotion activities. The registry will include data on demographics, contact and health care provider details, past and current medical history, relevant lab results, details of gestational diabetes episodes and details of participants’ interaction with the service. This is taking place in CMDHB and has been designed to be suitable to roll out to other areas at a later date.
www.dpt.org.nz/our-programmes/gestational-diabetes.

Contact the Diabetes Projects Trust for more information at: [e-mail].