Earlier this year, Dr Aveni Haynes the Rio Tinto Children's Diabetes Centre Epidemiology and Pre-Diabetes Theme Lead, and her team were awarded a Channel 7 Telethon Trust grant to work alongside kids and their families, to better understand what support, education or tools they need to help manage the early stage T1D journey.
The project, Supporting Families, is helping develop a much-needed clinical pathway to support families with kids who have early-stage type 1 diabetes (T1D).
“We are really excited about working with families in our community to learn about their needs and points of view, so we can work towards addressing these in a way that will be most helpful for them,” Dr Haynes said.
More than six months into the project, we spoke with Dr Haynes to find out where the project is at and what next for the team:
What is the supporting families project and what are you hoping to achieve?
A Telethon Trust funded project to co-design a new clinical pathway for WA families with children identified as having early-stage type 1 diabetes.
Where is the project at currently?
Community conversations and focus groups have been held with members of the WA community at the Type 1 Diabetes Family Centre and a range of different health care professionals in the Department of Diabetes & Endocrinology at PCH. The needs of members attending these sessions have been collated and are currently being used to inform a prototype clinical pathway to address these.
What are the next steps?
A workshop is scheduled for Tuesday 8 October which will be attended by members from the WA community and health care professionals from PCH. The prototype clinical pathway will be shared during this workshop with feedback obtained from all attending to be incorporated.
The resulting co-designed clinical pathway will be implemented at PCH by Dr Sarah Black in 2025, who has been awarded a CAHS Telethon Trust Fellowship to support this work.