Current Projects
- NHMRC Guidelines for Type 2 Diabetes
- DiabCo$t – Type 1: Assessing the Burden of Type 1 Diabetes in Australia
- Measuring Outcomes of Diabetes Education (MODE)
- The Supermarket SES Study
The Diabetes Unit is subcontracted to, and partners with, Diabetes Australia to lead and manage the development and updating of four evidence based NHMRC guidelines for diabetes. The contract covers updating the evidence for two existing guidelines (primary prevention and case detection and diagnosis) approved by the NHMRC in the early 2000s:
- National Evidence Based Guideline for the Primary Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes
- National Evidence Based Guideline for Case Detection and Diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes
And the development of two new guidelines – chronic kidney disease and patient education:
- National Evidence Based Guideline for Diagnosis, Prevention and Management of Chronic Kidney Disease in Type 2 Diabetes
- National Evidence Based Guideline for Patient Education in Type 2 Diabetes
In addition, The Diabetes Unit collaborated on the National Evidence Based Guideline for Blood Glucose Control in Type 2 Diabetes.
In June 2009, the NHMRC endorsed the case detection and diagnosis, kidney, patient education and blood glucose control guideline.
The guidelines synthesise the best available evidence for each topic into sets of recommendations, practice points and evidence statements to guide practitioners and policymakers and health care consumers in making decisions about what is the most effective and suitable treatment or management option for most people in most circumstances. This involves a rigorous process of systematic searching, reviewing, and grading the evidence according to strict NHMRC criteria in order to minimise bias and ensure that the guidelines accurately reflect the evidence.
The Guideline Consortium is composed of:
- Diabetes Australia (Consortium convenor)
- The Australian Diabetes Society
- The Australian Diabetes Educators Association
- The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
- The Diabetes Unit
Collaborators:
- The NSW Centre for Evidenced Based Health Care, University of Western Sydney
- The Cochrane Renal Review Group, Westmead Children’s Hospital
- The Cochrane Consumer Network
- The Caring for Australians with Renal Impairment (CARI) Guidelines Group
- Kidney Australia
Funding source:
- The Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing
DiabCo$t –Type 1 follows the 2002-2003 national costing study of type 2 diabetes, DIABCOST Australia - Assessing the burden of Type 2 Diabetes in Australia, which assessed the direct, indirect and intangible costs of this condition.
DiabCo$t –Type 1 is a new study. It describes the cost of type 1 diabetes in direct health system costs, indirect costs and quality of life. These costs were assessed by means of a national survey of people with type 1 diabetes aged 5 years and above, and parents or carers of people with type 1 diabetes.
This project represents an important step in completing a profile of the financial burden of diabetes to society and individuals in Australia, and in providing systematically derived local data to guide the development of policy and funding for diabetes services.
The DiabCo$t – Type 1 report is currently being completed and will be published shortly.
Collaborators:
- Diabetes Australia
- Eli Lilly (Australia)
- Institute of Obesity, Nutrition and Exercise, The University of Sydney
- The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Australia
Funding Sources:
- Eli Lilly (Australia)
- The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme via the Diabetes Australia National Diabetes Services Scheme Strategic Fund
This seminal project was designed to identify suitable and feasible ‘tools’ for objectively measuring the outcomes of diabetes patient education in the Australian clinical diabetes care setting in order to enable systematic assessment of the effectiveness of patient education and subsequent continuous improvement of this vital component of diabetes care.
From the international literature and expert knowledge, potentially suitable tools were identified and a set of rigorous criteria was applied to critically appraise the suitability, validity, reliability and sensitivity of available psychometric tools for measuring the education outcomes identified in the National Consensus on Outcomes and Indicators for Diabetes Patient Education which was developed by The Diabetes Unit in 2007 on behalf of Diabetes Australia.
Despite the identification of a sizeable number of potentially suitable tools only a relatively small number met most of the assessment criteria.
A journal article detailing the methodology, process and outcomes of this study has been published in Diabetic Medicine.
Funding Source:
- Australian Diabetes Society-Servier Grant 2007
Conducted in Sydney in 2008, the Supermarket SES Study examined the socio-economic status (SES) of supermarket locations to determine if there are SES mediated differences in the healthfulness of the content of supermarket shelves and whether this translates into differences in healthy versus unhealthy purchases by customers of these supermarkets.
The study identified high and low SES areas and supermarkets and compared the relative proportion of:
- healthy versus unhealthy foods on the shelves of supermarkets in high and low SES areas
- healthy versus unhealthy foods purchased by shoppers attending these supermarkets
This study is important in contributing to the pool of knowledge about SES and nutrition in Australia and for contributing new methodology to this area. For example, most research of this kind is based on food frequency questionnaires and interviews that rely on study participants’ recall of their purchases. However, our study was based on an objective analysis of actual purchases through the collection of shoppers’ dockets.
This study found some differences between high and low SES areas.
An article on the findings from the Supermarket SES Study is due for publication in the Australian Journal of Health Promotion.
Funding source
No external funding was sought for this project.