To set up as a DAFNE centre, you will need to meet the following criteria and resources.
Established healthcare professionals
- 1 diabetes specialist nurse
- 1 diabetes specialist dietitian
- 1 diabetes consultant diabetologist / specialist registrar
- You will also need to consider access to administrative support for the DAFNE service. The administrative hours required will depend on how many courses you run.
Educator qualities/competences for DSNs and dietitians
Knowledge and experience
Please bear in mind that if you do not exactly meet the specification, this does not necessarily
mean you are not suitable, although you may find the Remote DAFNE Educator Programme
(RDEP) more demanding. Effective communication is a key DAFNE educator skill. Educators
must be able to anticipate and address their own barriers to communication, and those of
group participants, to communicate complex ideas with clarity.
Proposed DAFNE educators must be aware of the necessary time commitments to complete
the RDEP and quality assurance (QA) requirements of DAFNE.
The following specification is seen as including the qualities for a DAFNE educator, in order to
maintain consistently high quality:
| Essential | Desirable |
| Understanding of aetiology, diagnosis and management of type 1 diabetes. | To have a relevant teaching qualification in adult learning or equivalent experience. |
| Be in a role that can include DAFNE course delivery in your job plan. | To have experience of teaching groups. |
| To have worked as part of a specialist type 1 diabetes team for a minimum of 1 year. | |
| To have ongoing responsibility for management and support of type 1 patients. |
Qualities/competences
| Essential | Desirable |
| A willingness to take on skills normally outside the traditional role of a dietitian or a nurse. For example, dietitians develop their insulin dose adjustment skills and diabetes specialist nurses develop their carbohydrate counting skills. | Familiar with methods of peer assessment. |
| Empathy with DAFNE philosophy. | Familiar with the use of personal development plans. |
| Desire to work in a patient-centered way to encourage and support behaviour change. | |
| Ability to develop and maintain communication with people on complex matters, issues and ideas and/or in complex situations. |
The following steps must be completed before training can commence:
1 - DAFNE consortium agreement
A consortium agreement and service level agreement (SLA) will need to be signed on behalf of your organisation. It is important that the individual who signs on behalf of your organisation has financial authority for the service covered by the consortium agreement. The individual needs to have accountability for the diabetes service and authorisation within the standard financial instructions to sign the consortium agreement and SLA.
Please contact the central DAFNE team if you are interested in becoming a DAFNE centre and the necessary paperwork will be issued.
2 - Costs
All DAFNE centres pay an annual contribution fee, this varies according to the number of trained educators at the DAFNE centre (minimum of 2 educators). The contribution fees are updated annually. New centres that join the DAFNE consortium part way through a financial year, will be charged a pro rata fee from the month the consortium agreement and SLA is issued. The central contribution fees for the 2022-23 financial year can be found here:
Central-contribution-fees-2022-23.pdf
New centres are required to provide a purchase order number for their contribution at the same time as returning their signed agreement and SLA.
