Diabetes and Homelessness

People with diabetes who are homeless are at much higher risk of serious complications or death. This is because of the difficulties managing their condition whilst homeless, including the daily challenges getting access to healthy food and health care.

With funding from the Burdett Trust for Nursing and support from Diabetes UK, the Pathway charity led a national partnership project from April 2023 to June 2024 to look at what could be done to help. The LNNM were one of the partners. The project saw participation from both specialist inclusion health and diabetes nurses as well as lived experience voices, and allied professionals

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Project Outputs

The outputs from the project are freely available and can be accessed here:

Supporting people experiencing homelessness with diabetes

This free e-learning course provides an overview of the challenges which can present when people experiencing homelessness have diabetes, including a focus on Safeguarding Adult Reviews after death, and what can be learned from these.

Diabetes Nursing Guidance for people experiencing homelessness

The Queen’s Institute of Community Nursing Homeless and Inclusion Health Programme guidance for nurses and support workers.

Diabetes Information Leaflets from Groundswell

A Diabetes Health Guide and Leaflet on Managing Diabetes.

Diabetes and Eye Health

This handy leaflet on eye health features top tips for protecting eye sight as well as advice on engaging with inclusion health and specialist diabetes nurses, and the valuable services they can offer.

Don’t Tell Us Off – Examining Ways to Improve the Health Care of People Experiencing Homelessness with Diabetes

A Comprehensive Project Report, which includes insights from the project, survey results, patient interviews, literature reviews and more

Diabetes and Homelessness: Quality Improvement Tools

A set of tools to enable inclusion health and specialist diabetes services practitioners to undertake a local Quality Improvement project.

Top Tips for Improving Diabetes Care for People Experiencing Homelessness

A set of 3 downloadable resources covering top tips for improving diabetes care for people experiencing homelessness, including advice on assessment, patient management, linking up with homelessness services, and training.

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