LEBANON — Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital is launching a new diabetes clinic with the help of a $550,000 federal grant.

The clinic, which will be embeded in APD’s primary care department, will be staffed with a nurse practitioner who is certified in diabetes care and education, a nurse educator, support staff, and include support from the assistant medical director of Primary Care.

“Diabetes is a complex disease, affecting many of our patients and requiring constant attention in the context of primary care,” Dr. Annika Brown, assistant medical director at APD, said in a December news release announcing the new clinic. “This embedded clinic will help us improve this care and generate models for chronic disease management in general.”

The clinic will use personalized and up-to-date best practices established by the American Diabetes Association.

Approximately 25% of primary care patients at APD have diabetes or prediabetes. Nationally, about 37.3 million people have diabetes, 11.3% of the U.S. population; and 96 million people aged 18 years or older have prediabetes, 38% of the adult U.S. population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But many patients struggle to manage the disease. The APD clinic aims to help by increasing access to diabetes self-management education, increasing diabetes-only visits, using new technology and increasing staff education on new treatments and guidelines.

The funding for the clinic comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.

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