"Shouldn't be beyond possibility to have a single room"

Dear newcat71

Thank you for your feedback and for raising your concerns regarding the treatment you received at the Community Treatment and Care Service. Please accept our sincere apologies for the distress and inconvenience that this has caused you and we appreciate you taking the time to raise this with us.

We have investigated the points that you have raised and can provide the following information.

The clinic that you attended, the Community Treatment and Care Service (CTAC), is a developing service which has been set up in response to the 2018 General Medical Services Contract in Scotland. The Community Treatment and Care Service now delivers several elements of healthcare that were traditionally undertaken by GP Practices, one of these being Chronic Disease Monitoring which includes Diabetes review.

The Community Treatment and Care Service is delivered from local GP Practices and local Community Hospitals. Please be assured that nursing staff respect our patient’s rights to confidentiality and privacy in all aspects of care, and are mindful that some clinic rooms in the Community Hospitals can have other patients in the room separated by our approved infection control curtains for privacy.

The nursing staff have been doing training and development work with NHS Tayside in a new and developing ‘Reshaping Diabetes care in Tayside’. All people with diabetes will have their bloods and screening (e.g blood pressure, weight, foot screening) done in the community within primary care (CTAC or GP Practice).

iDiabetes (intelligent Diabetes) is an intelligent clinical decision support tool that has been developed to support primary and secondary care clinicians in the management of people with diabetes. The GP Practices are informing their patients of this and patients can opt out of the research element of this which includes genetic testing.

We are working closely with the GP Practices and Secondary Care to ensure test results are fed back to them for assessment and follow up. A new computer system called SCI Diabetes is a single point of entry for all screening measures and this informs the nursing staff when the foot screening is due (usually every 2 years) and hip and waist measuring is every 5 years. The nurses have been trained to follow this guidance for obtaining measurements:

Waist-. The tape measure should be placed mid-way between the lower border of the costal margin (I.e. the bottom of the rib cage) and the top border of the iliac crest.

Hip-. Apply the tape at the widest part, usually between the greater trochanter (top of the thigh bone) and the lower buttock level.

To support learning from your feedback our staff are working on refreshing their knowledge and skills in obtaining hip and waist measurements and are reflecting on how your treatment and experience could have been improved.

We hope you have been assured that we take all concerns brought to our attention very seriously and thoroughly review the issues raised in an effort to improve the experience of our patients.

Jane Maxtone

Senior Nurse

Community Treatment and Care Service

Perth and Kinross

06/05/25