Through Nesta’s Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund, Diabetes UK has been piloting a new peer support service for people with type 2 diabetes called Type 2 Together.

We engaged six Clinical Commissioning Groups to partner with us, each of them contributing towards the project costs within their area. In return Diabetes UK found and trained volunteer peer support facilitators to lead peer groups in their area, and led the marketing strategy to raise awareness of the service.

Over the course of the project we successfully reached nearly 900 people with type 2 diabetes and established over 50 new peer support groups. We have also recruited and trained nearly 90 fantastic volunteer facilitators who are leading our groups and helping people learn more about living with diabetes.

What we learnt

Diabetes UK has learnt a tremendous amount from the delivery of the project. As an organisation, this project was our first attempt at delivering a service at scale in partnership with CCGs. Although we have strong relationships with local commissioners and many were interested in partnering with us, the time taken to agree funding and contracts set the project delivery back. Further delays were also caused by our delivery model – we were committed to employ health professionals to support our volunteers with diabetes specialist knowledge, however, as a charity we found it very difficult to recruit healthcare professionals and eventually settled with contracting NHS trusts to provide the post for a period.

Our biggest lesson was probably in trying to reach people with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes UK is the UK’s leading diabetes charity, supporting thousands of people with diabetes annually. Our marketing strategy was reliant on local GP practices to refer their patients to the service to launch the service at scale. However, it proved to be much more difficult to engage primary care than we had originally anticipated, and despite the funding arrangement with the local CCG they also did not have as big an influence on GPs as we had expected.

We strongly believe that peer support can have a huge impact on people’s knowledge and confidence to manage their diabetes

Despite these challenges we are delighted with how much we’ve achieved in establishing new peer support groups and giving people with diabetes the opportunity to learn more and live well with diabetes. Working with Nesta has enabled us to learn and adapt as we go, and their flexibility and understanding that innovation projects don’t always go to plan has been invaluable in allowing (and encouraging) us to persist with the service. As a result Diabetes UK has committed to embed peer support groups as a core service offer.

Although the commissioned model of Type 2 Together has proved to require too much resource for Diabetes UK to run in the long term, we strongly believe that peer support can have a huge impact on people’s knowledge and confidence to manage their diabetes.

Following the completion of the Type 2 Together pilot, Diabetes UK will roll out the Type 2 Together peer support product as a training and support package to our existing local group network. Using our existing local groups will enable us to offer peer support across the UK, where the demand is the greatest – rather than where the health system is able to fund it. Diabetes UK has a network of 243 local groups across the UK, which we have increased significantly in recent years and will continue to grow. In the next five years we aim to have half of our local groups providing peer support in their local areas.

Photo credit: Diabetes UK