Background
National Diabetes Week (NDW) is an opportunity to showcase our service & identify quality improvement activities for our department
The diabetes education team (DET) organise an annual questionnaire as one part of National Diabetes week.
Aim
1. To promote NDW
2. To identify area specific diabetes education/management needs
Objectives:
1. Collect completed questionnaires from all hospital clinical areas
2. Establish priority areas requiring inservice diabetes education
3. Develop education to address specific needs
Method
The DET developed a questionnaire made up of fourteen questions which encompassed all aspects of diabetes care. This was sent to all Nurse Unit Managers (NUM) who made them available for their Nursing staff to complete by a set date.
All completed questionnaires were then sent via internal mail to the diabetes education office. All questionnaires were corrected by the DET and all correct entries were entered into a draw with the winner given a morning or afternoon tea for their area or ward.
Results
Results show that all hospital areas that participated achieved more than 50% of correct responses. 

Conclusion
This exercise successfully promoted National Diabetes Week and identified gaps in knowledge. This was most evident in the area of hypoglycaemic management. The DET planned nursing update days at St Vincent’s Hospital for Registered nurses both in the acute and subacute area of nursing. The programme for these nursing updates included detailed information on the treatment of hypoglycaemia as well as an update on the St Vincent’s Hospital policy regarding treatment of hypoglycaemia.
A hypoglycaemia inservice has been scheduled for all clinical area of the organisation. Follow up evaluation will be performed during the next NDW