Digital First - What does this mean for your DESMOND service?
In the UK, diabetes education provision and services continue to evolve quicker than ever, especially due to a stark rise in referral numbers across the nation and ever reducing budgets and clinical staff availability, forcing teams to do more, with less.
One potential solution to this is to turn your service design on its head and move to a Digital First approach. This also aligns nicely with the direction of travel for the NHS outlined in the 10 Year Health Plan published by the Department of Health and Social Care in July 2025.
For education providers this means turning your offer on its head so that MyDESMOND becomes your first-line offer for all referrals. For smooth operations we recommend ensuring email addresses and mobile phone numbers are collected on the referral form. With this information provided at the point of referral it makes the process of onboarding your patients very quick and simple; however, we would not recommend sending patients their verification code out of the blue - think about developing a localised leaflet for referrers to hand to patients at the point of referral that explains what DESMOND and MyDESMOND are, and what the next steps will be after their healthcare team refers them to the service. This way you can alert them to keep an eye on their email account or text messages for their verification code, or how to advice you that they would prefer a group education options. Do get in touch with Head Office if this is something you would like support with, we are happy to help. The process of onboarding to MyDESMOND takes about 20 seconds as long as you have the patients email address. Rest assured that MyDESMOND is deemed on par with group structured education programmes and as a result can be coded the same on patient records.
If MyDESMOND/a digital programme is not for them then as part of the Digital First approach we then suggest your second line offer being a virtual group - you can find lots of information about delivering our group programmes virtually on our portal including our culturally tailored virtual slide sets, as well as information to help uptake of virtual groups, or get in touch for more information & how to attend one of our ‘building your confidence to deliver virtually’ workshops.
This approach should then leave you with a reduced number of referrals to then offer face-to-face group to. This means that spaces on face-to-face groups can then be offered to those in greatest need, and as the most expensive part of your service, you should instantly see a shift in the resources you need to maintain your DESMOND service. Don’t forget to check out our articles about Widening Your Provision with guidance of how you can adapt and tailor your groups to meet the growing, changing needs of your local population. Again, do get in touch if you want to talk through any of these in more details.
Adopting a digital first approach isn’t the only thing you can do to redesign your service in the face of growing referrals numbers and reduced budgets - here are some links to other articles for things to consider & do not hesitate to get in touch with DESMOND Head Office to organise a call to discuss what this means for your service:
Train lay educators to deliver they could deliver in other languages and potentially enable out-of-hours services
Introduce self-referral to open up routes for direct-to-patient communications
Think about things you can do to help improve the quality of your referrals