Birmingham NHS trust entrusts paediatric diabetes management to Hicom

Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust (BWC NHS Trust) has celebrated working with Hicom’s paediatric diabetes management software-as-a-service solution, Twinkle for 10 years. It underpins care for children and young people with diabetes.

The Trust’s multidisciplinary team, which comprises over 30 users including administrative staff, consultants, nurses and dieticians, has been relying on Twinkle for the care of over 400 paediatric patients per annum, since 2012.

Twinkle optimises patient care by providing information to multidisciplinary clinical teams at the point of care. In addition, Twinkle has made it easier and quicker for the team to measure performance and collate the information required for the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit (NPDA) and the Best Practice Tariff (BPT).

According to recent research by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), the number of young people being treated for diabetes continues to increase. In 2019, there were an estimated 36,000 children in the UK with diabetes under the age of 19, up from 31,500 in 2015.

Hicom’s Twinkle streamlines the clinical management of paediatric diabetes patients by providing a single source of up-to-date data for each of the Trust’s patients, as well as giving access to information in a format that is easy to extract for audit. In addition to clinical drivers, Twinkle also ensures that the Trust complies with the latest data security and protection requirements around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) annual assessment.

Marie McElroy, Assistant Service Manager, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, comments: “In recent years, diabetes treatment has moved on incredibly quickly, as has the technology that our patients use. In all the time we have been working with Hicom, they’ve always kept Twinkle up to the minute with those developments; adding new technologies and features and removing elements that have become redundant.

“In addition, it’s undoubtedly the single most up to date reporting system we have for our patients and has proven invaluable for us in how we ensure high quality care for our patients and their families.”