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High quality prepregnancy care is essential for women with diabetes.

Women with diabetes have an increased risk of pregnancy complications. Many of these complications are due to high glucose levels in the first ten weeks of pregnancy. This means that pregnancy planning and tight glucose control is essential. Prepregnancy care is additional clinical care offered to women planning pregnancy. As part of our active HRB grant, we identified that prepregnancy care may be successfully delivered on a regional basis and improves pregnancy outcomes for attendees. The cost of delivering the program is less than the cost of managing the complications experienced by those who do not attend. Unfortunately, prepregnancy care is only available to a minority of women and when available, only 50% attend. We aim to ensure tight glucose control before pregnancy and have strict guidelines on weight gain during pregnancy but women struggle to achieve this even with our support. This is partly due to the limited dietician time available to women. As part of this application we aim to overcome these factors with the following activities:
1. Arrange a national information seminar for women with diabetes to focus on the benefits of prepregnancy care and pregnancy planning.
2. Create and distribute a diet booklet for women with diabetes who are pregnant or planning pregnancy.
3. Develop an online website with user-friendly information for women with diabetes including the diet book described above.
4. Arrange a meeting of healthcare professionals and women with diabetes to encourage the development and audit of high quality prepregnancy care programs nationally.