Rachel shares her inspiring journey from Nurse to Diabetes Foot Lead
Rachel Berrington, Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Diabetes Foot Lead
Rachel Berrington is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Diabetes Foot Lead for University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) and is part of Leicester Diabetes Centre (LDC)'s EDEN team who provide diabetes education to healthcare professionals. We asked Rachel about her roles and how she came to work in diabetes care, education, and research.
Rachel qualified as a nurse in 1997 and worked on Ward 3 at Leicester General Hospital, which was then a diabetes ward. In 2002, Rachel continued to work on Ward 3 but also had the opportunity to spend time in diabetes care across all three hospital sites in Leicester.
“At that point diabetes care was provided over all three hospital sites. Historically the General, Royal Infirmary and Glenfield were separate hospitals, and all worked quite differently,” Rachel explains.
She continues: “Today of course we’re all one UHL team. I was fortunate that I had a role that was split across all three, so I had the opportunity to work in all aspects of diabetes care and shadow all the specialist clinics that were available at that time, while also working on the wards,”
Rachel was then seconded to back-fill for an experienced Diabetes Nurse Specialist to become a DAFNE (Dose Adjustment For Normal Eating) Educator in the type 1 diabetes education programme, which Leicester was one of the first in the UK to offer.
Rachel said: “At the time the secondment was part of my five-year plan to work in diabetes care, and now some twenty years later I’m still here. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in most areas of diabetes care and now specialise in diabetic foot care.
“I am the lead nurse within the diabetic foot service for UHL, which means I play a key role in underpinning primary and secondary care to try and make the pathway of care for patients with foot problems as seamless as possible. We want to try and prevent unnecessary visits to the secondary care setting if patients can be seen closer to home by a Community Podiatrist.”
Rachel now has a split role dividing her time between clinical work and the Leicester Diabetes Centre where she provides education for healthcare professionals and supports the delivery of health research. Rachel’s passion is championing the importance of foot care for people with diabetes and educating healthcare professionals about the risks associated with diabetes.
People with diabetes can have severe outcomes for foot problems because the nerve endings in their feet become damaged and diabetes can impede wound healing, meaning that any wounds that occur can easily go unnoticed and become serious quickly.
Rachel explains: “Mortality is high when it comes to diabetic foot problems. If someone has a foot ulcer alone their mortality at 5 years is 50%, if they have a major amputation like removing a foot the mortality at 5 years is 80%. That's higher than most of the common cancers. There is also a significant cost to hospitals both in terms of money and worse, in the physical cost to the patients of having these complications.”
This is why Rachel feels that research is so important in healthcare, adding: “Research underpins the clinical side of what I do. We can try our best and believe we’re giving good care, but we need research to back up that the care we’re giving is at the level it needs to be at to prevent and slow the complications that diabetes can cause.
"Research is fundamental to getting the patients good outcomes. People live with diabetes 24/7 but we only see a snapshot of that in clinics. Clinical research lets us know that we are providing gold standard advice that is underpinned by good evidence.”
Rachel is part of the research team delivering the MiFoot study, which aims to test a new type of care that has been specifically designed for people with diabetes-related Foot Ulcer Disease.
For more information about the MiFoot study, visit: www.mifoot.org.uk