Supportive Winter Strategies

What advice do you regularly give to patients struggling with diabetes control during the winter months? Right, so here I feel that we need to be much more supportive rather than punitive. We tend to be very critical and we tend to tell patients what they are not doing well when they come to their regular checks and come to see the GP. And during the winter, well, in fact, all through the year, but particularly during the winter, I feel that we need to be much more supportive of little lapses and encouraging people not to be despondent about having lapses, but to accept them and to know that they can just start again. We also try and encourage patients to communicate with each other and because they are indoors much more to use resources such as the online resources to refer back to the structured education resources that hopefully they've attended. We have the Know Diabetes website that we have encouraged our patients to register with and there is a wealth of resource on that website too. Thank you very much. And then thinking about the spring, the spring months, a spring often inspires fresh goals. What changes do your patients with diabetes tend to focus on? Any goals that they share with you regularly? Yes, people are feeling much more inspired. sun is shining hopefully, they're more likely to be meeting up with friends and family, and people are much more likely to be wanting to make changes. We try at this time of year to once again set educational meetings up so that we can do some regular checks to see where patients of what changes that they could make. So we do some blood tests, we arrange for them to come in and see the nurses and based on their blood tests and so on we discuss making medication changes which hopefully won't mean too many medication changes or reducing their medication because they may be exercising more, they may be going for more walks outdoors. There are more daylight hours, so it's much, much better for them to be going out into the parks and generally moving more.