X-PERT Health provides effective education courses to prevent, manage and reduce the escalating financial burden of diabetes. Our growing network of 84 centres and more than 600 educators has helped more than a quarter of a million people so far.

Our courses are national programmes that fully meet the Department of Health and Diabetes UK criteria to fulfil the National Institute of Health and Care (NICE) guidance.

Our aim is to ensure that all people at risk of, or diagnosed with, diabetes have access to good quality and enjoyable structured education leading to increased skills, knowledge and confidence in the prevention and self-management of their long-term medical conditions. Whether you have had diabetes for 20 years or whether you have been newly diagnosed, our courses are for you.

We have 3 programmes, these are:

X-PERT Prevention of Diabetes (X-POD)

X-PERT Diabetes

X-PERT Insulin

Written by Dr Trudi Deakin, the X-PERT Programmes are based upon the theories of patient empowerment, discovery learning and patient-centred care. People with diabetes see a healthcare professional for around 3 hours each year and have to spend the remaining 8,757 hours self-managing their condition.

The existing government is determined to try and control the cost of health services across the UK through education and awareness and has set up the National Diabetes Awareness and Prevention Programme. This means that everyone who is at risk or has type 2 diabetes should have access to training for self-management. We can demonstrate proven results that X-PERT Health: can reduce the burden of cost on the NHS budgets, uses the most up to date evidence based research, is independent of both the NHS and commercial interests, is the only Diabetes Education and Awareness programme that provides ongoing support, and is NHS NICE guideline accredited.

What is Diabetes? Diabetes is a common condition in which the amount of glucose in the blood at diagnosis is too high because the body cannot use the glucose as energy. Diabetes occurs when the body does not produce enough insulin, or produces insulin but cannot use it properly. There are two types of diabetes:

• Type 1 diabetes occurs when there is a severe lack of insulin in the body because the cells in the pancreas that produce it have been destroyed.
• Type 2 diabetes develops when the body can still make some insulin, but not enough for its needs, or when the insulin that is produced does not work properly (known as insulin resistance).