Representatives from the Donegal Branch of Diabetes Ireland met with Minister for Health, Ms Jennifer Carroll MacNeill TD, on her recent visit to Donegal to highlight the severe under-resourcing of adult diabetes services in Letterkenny University Hospital (LUH) which is impacting on the level of care that is being provided to the local diabetes community.

Chairperson Mr Paul Gillespie highlighted their long-time efforts to have these issues addressed with a number of the Minister’s predecessors but informed the Minister that very little had been done to deliver the extra staffing resources needed and type 1 diabetes care for adults had further declined.

At present, there are two consultant endocrinologists posts vacant in LUH and the HSE, despite several recruitment attempts to fill the posts, have failed to fill the posts. “We outlined to the Minister that we believe the difficulties in recruiting and retaining endocrinologists is partly due to the fact that LUH has never been awarded the two Advanced Nurse Practitioner (ANP) posts so badly needed for the service” said Paul.

At a recent meeting, LUH Hospital Management confirmed that an ANP post for the adult Type 1 diabetes service was their main priority but were awaiting agreement from the HSE to provide funding for the post. The group pressed the Minister to provide the funding for this post and highlighted that when her predecessor Minister James O’Reilly sanctioned an ANP post for the hospital’s paediatric type 1 diabetes service, it transformed the service and the care provided to our children living with Type 1 diabetes and their families. “In our view, a similar commitment for the adult service to support a new consultant endocrinologist due to start next month would transform the level of type 1 diabetes care for our community” added Paul.

Representatives also highlighted the fact that a paediatric diabetes centre of excellence for the North West region, which was part of the HSE model of care guidance over 10 years ago has never been fully implemented. A centre of excellence needs a paediatric consultant endocrinologist based in LUH, due to size of population, along with a second paediatric endocrinologist based in SUH for shared cover.

“The Minister was very attentive and we believe had a good understanding of the challenges of living with type 1 diabetes. She committed to find out why the Type 1 Adult ANP positions had never been sanctioned and would revert to the delegation in a timely manner. The minister also committed to pursuing the other resources needed to give proper equity of care for everyone in our community” concluded Paul.