The Samoan National Health Service’s Diabetic Foot Clinic (DFC) was established almost a year ago, with the goal of providing quality, multidisciplinary wound management to reduce the number of amputations caused by diabetic foot complications.
While we can see the benefits of the DFC through individual client outcomes it is important to understand the broader benefits (and costs) of the clinic in order to ensure that it is both effective and sustainable.
Marjolein Weigman from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, has been interning with Motivation Australia in order to undertake this research as part of her Bachelors Thesis. Marjolein recently spent three weeks in Samoa collecting data required to complete her project investigating the “Costs and benefits of the Diabetic Foot Clinic in Samoa”.
She is now in the process of analysing the wealth of data she collected and is looking forward to sharing her findings. We are certainly excited to hear about the findings of her research and hope that the data can be used to expand non-surgical diabetic foot services throughout the Pacific!
Marjolein and Motivation Australia would like to extend a sincere thankyou to all personnel from the National Health Service and Ministry of Health for their support and collaboration, with a special thanks to the staff at the Mobility Device Service and DFC.
She is pictured above with some of the MDS team (L-R): Junior, Timani, Ao, Marjolein, Pauline and AJ.