By establishing and running an outreach clinic in each of the three slums, the project aims to improve the management of diabetes, its co-morbidities, and complications with an emphasis on promoting self-care, compliance to treatment and lifestyle changes.
The clinics will be set up in existing primary health care facilities. Each clinic will be run on a fortnightly basis on weekends and manned voluntarily by four clinicians, two nurses, a counsellor and an assistant. Staff will be available to offer counselling and consultation outside of the clinic's normal opening hours in more urgent situations. Health care personnel manning the service will be trained in the principles of diabetes care and management based on current guidelines and existing training materials developed by Kenya Diabetes Management and Information Centre.
Once a month, a specialist physician will visit the clinics to deal with complicated cases. The work carried out at the clinics will focus on promoting self-care, monitoring of blood glucose and blood pressure, and management of complications. Once the patient's blood glucose and blood pressure are controlled, health workers will conduct home visits to the patients to check that things are proceeding well.
450 people with diabetes and 2,250 people with hypertension will benefit from the improved care available to them at the clinics.
