Delivering diabetes care: all together now?

Over 95% patient acceptability recorded in the UK alone. Fully trained medically competent staff always available, Loan of instructional video on request. Unit return facility. The conference was chaired jointly by Dr Kenneth Shaw and Professor Anne-Louise Kinmonth. Professor John Gabbay (Director, Wessex Institute of Public Health) suggested that the aim in diabetes care should be to achieve an overall health gain. To do this it was necessary to increase the overlap between needs, demands and supply of care and he examined these three areas in terms of what purchasers would look at. Different approaches to the delivery of care were examined by Dr Brian Hurwitz (GP, London), He looked historically at initiatives in community care in the latter part of this century and at studies which showed that GP care did not match that delivered by hospitals. He described how, in response to these results, some GPs had set up computer recall systems to enable them to supply better service to patients. They had shown that properly structured GP care could deliver care equivalent to that of hospitals. However, it was important for GPs to have access to special services such as education, dietetics, chiropody and eye review, in order to supply this standard of care, Delegates were treated to a panel of patients giving their impressions of the care they had received over the years. Present issues of care were examined by Dr Kenneth Shaw (Consultant Physician, Portsmouth). He believed hospitals could