B11: Acute & Inpatient Diabetic Foot

Most diabetic foot disease is chronic and unhurried. The acutely inflamed or septic foot is the exception: like a heart attack or stroke, it is an event, and the outcome depends on how fast it is recognised and treated. In non-elective admissions, sepsis is the strongest predictor of major amputation and one of the strongest predictors of in-hospital death, yet in one 17-year institutional series, a rapid-access inpatient pathway cut in-hospital major amputation from roughly one in five to around one in twenty.

The module teaches the typical, infection-driven diabetic foot attack and the atypical ischaemic or Charcot attack, and a bedside differential for the hot foot built on the portal and the pulses. It covers first-hour sepsis care, necrotising infection as a surgical emergency, source control and perfusion assessment in parallel rather than in sequence, acute limb ischaemia, and metabolic emergencies such as HHS and DKA. It then sets out who needs admission and the inpatient bundle: glycaemia, offloading and heel protection from the first hour, VTE prophylaxis, nutrition and discharge planning.

Content is tiered at Foundation, Core and Advanced level, with triage and admission-to-discharge algorithms and case vignettes. You receive the Teaching Document, the Evidence Base, the slide deck and a narrated video.