Where are people with Diabetic foot problems treated in the NHS?

As I mentioned already, you have care pathways, referral pathways, so you will initially be seen by your GP or you may be already under the care of a podiatrist, now that may be either NHS or private, whichever. Now, they will decide if you need to be seen quickly by a hospital team. That does not necessarily mean that you will be admitted to hospital, but you will come to see the people in the foot clinic, we try to see people as quickly as possible, you know, within 48 hours if necessary, or possibly within a week depending on what capacity we have to see people. But an assessment is made by the podiatrist as to how severe the foot is. We have a traffic light system where they can look to see where you fall. And if you fall in a red zone, you might be admitted straight into hospital. So you've got the community, then you have outpatient podiatry, and then you have hospital admissions directly, which we've mentioned before was something called foot attack. Now, those will be for patients who are quite ill in the sense that they have fever, they feel very unwell, they may be feeling quite shivery. Their blood glucose control is very bad with very high blood sugars that they've got a swollen painful foot that's red, or they may even be gangrene and so those patients will need to be seen in hospital, be admitted straight away. So those are the levels. Now you can bypass all of those, for example you could go to see your GP, your GP will take one look at your foot and decide no you need to be seen straight away in hospital or be seen soon by the hospital podiatry team and they will make a referral to us and we will slot you in as soon as possible.