Led by University of Exeter
Introduction
Children and young people diagnosed with diabetes are more likely to experience problems with their mental health, especially in the first year following their diagnosis. Hospital teams are aware of this and there are various offers in place to help these young people. However, these offers are often focused on treating things once they are a problem. It would be useful to help these young people earlier or to offer support that would stop these problems occurring in the first place.
One potential way to do this is through social prescribing, a popular approach often used by GPs and ‘link workers’ to connect people to local, non-medical activities and support in their communities like sports clubs or art groups to improve their health and wellbeing.
Aims and objectives
In the future, we want to undertake a research study where we compare different ways of supporting young people’s mental health in hospital settings to see what works best for children and young people with diabetes. To design that study, there are four areas we need to understand better.
- First, we want to know what is offered to young people diagnosed with diabetes to help with their wellbeing, both in terms of national guidelines and differences in local areas.
- Second, we want to know how social prescribing could be delivered in these settings, where link workers would be based, how much that would cost, and how they would be trained.
- Third, we want to understand what success would look like in these programmes, what outcomes would be important to young people, their clinical teams, and those who fund services.
- Lastly, we need information to help us plan what form a later study should take. For example, we need to decide if everyone would get the social prescribing link worker or if some young people would only receive the standard support already offered.
Research methods
We will use a mix of interviews, discussion groups, and reading existing research to examine these areas in detail and come up with a plan for our future project. We will do this over 12 months. We are working closely with two hospital paediatric teams across all these areas, and we will also collect information from other teams who are already delivering social prescribing.
We have made sure that we work closely with young people who have experience of the sorts of services we are looking into. We have a dedicated youth engagement lead who has had discussions with young people with long-term conditions about how we develop and write this project. We will also bring together a group of young people to guide and inform the work across the 12 months. Similarly, we will work closely with those around the young people – the professional clinicians, the link workers and those who pay for services – to understand what information is most useful to serve those young people as well as possible.
Outcomes
This development work will provide us with the necessary information to allow us to develop a future study to test the impact of hospital-led social prescribing for children and young people with diabetes, and whether it is value for money. It will increase what we know about how to help these young people as early as possible to avoid them developing further mental ill health. We will make sure these findings are presented both to the people delivering services and other researchers, to inform practice as much as possible.