Special Projects
The Diabetes CCRE is strongly committed to the development of new research programs, and has provided funding to CCRE CIs and AIs to facilitate research that extends the Centre's research beyond that which currently exists.
Funding priority is given to projects that have a strong community engagement component, and involve several CCRE researchers. Funding has been provided in 2009 to facilitate two projects, details of which can be found below:
Project 1: A telemedicine diabetes care support program
The overall goal of this project is to improve health care and quality of life for Australian adults with Type 1 diabetes by using current telecommunication technologies to improve self management, specifically through communication via mobile phones and the internet. Advice will be targeted to adults with Type 1 diabetes, but with additional funding and paediatric endocrinology input could be extended to children and their carers.
The project will be implemented in three stages. The first involves educational messaging (Tips of the Day) via mobile phones, involving tips on diabetes care and management that are delivered on a daily or weekly basis. Following community consultation, this initial stage will be rolled out and tested in a small pilot group. In addition to these tips, reminders of individual health care professional appointments will also be provided. The second stage of the project involves an exploration of the interest in and capability of patients with Type 1 diabetes to use an additional secure patient portal application to transfer data such as their blood glucose meter readings to their health care professionals.
Personnel involved: CCRE CI Alicia Jenkins, CCRE AIs David O'Neal, Sven-Erik Bursell and Christine Walker and Chris Ryan (project officer employed part-time on project).
Project 2: Development and validation of an instrument to measure quality of life (QoL) in patients with diabetes and vision-threatening diabetic retinopathy (VTDR)
Diabetic retinopathy is the most specific complication of diabetes and the leading cause of blindness in working-aged individuals. It can have a significant impact on participation on quality of life (QoL), but to date the exact impact has not been adequately demonstrated due to a lack of an instrument to measure QoL in patients with vision-threatening DR (VTDR). The project aims to develop a disease-specific questionnaire which will measure QoL in people with diabetes and VTDR. The content of the questionnaire will be developed through community consultation via focus groups. This will help identify all QoL items and domains important to people with VTDR. Modern psychometric theory will be used to produce a novel VTDR-specific QoL instrument to comprehensively assess the impact of VTDR on key aspects of QoL. The final questionnaire that is produced will be tested on a sample population before being rolled out in a larger sample size.
Personnel involved: CCRE AIs Tien Wong, Ecosse Lamoureux and Christine Walker along with colleagues at the Centre for Eye Research Australia including Gwyneth Rees, Mohamed Dirani and others.