Nina Patel Nurse Consultant, Diabetes

About me

Nina is a Health Foundation Leadership Fellow and Nurse Consultant Diabetes at Brent Community Services.

Nina registered as a nurse in 1978 and as a midwife a year later. She went on to qualify as a health visitor and worked as a specialist paediatric health visitor working with children and families with long-term conditions. During this time, she came across families with children who suffered from sickle cell and thallasemia. 

Her next job was as a heamoglobinopathy counsellor at the Brent Sickle Cell and Thallasaemia Centre. As a sickle cell and thallaseamia counsellor, Nina was involved in helping to developed community education and screening services for these conditions and also helped to develop antenatal counselling services for prenatal diagnosis.

Nina worked in Africa and India to deliver education and training for health professionals on genetic counselling. 

She has gained numerous diplomas and a masters degree in health sciences.

One of her main achievements in her post at the time of the fellowship was to ensure diabetic patients receive the same standards of care from different clinicians. Nina achieved this by encouraging clinical staff across primary and acute care to attend behavioural change therapy sessions. Nina has also helped acute care consultants to set up a transitional clinic for young people with diabetes.

In Nina's previous post as a secondment to community care for diabetes service development she managed to convince her PCT to establish five grade H nursing posts and a diabetes community consultant physicians to create a community-based diabetes team, which led to the PCT implementing the Diabetes National Service Framework.

Nina was also accepted to join the Johnson and Johnson Nurse Leadership programme run by the Kind Fund in 2001.