About Us

Together, we're aligning actions against diabetes, and engaging South Carolinians to lead healthier lives.

Vision

Winning the fight against diabetes.

Mission

To align actions against diabetes, engaging South Carolinians to lead healthier lives.

Overview

Diabetes imposes a devastating toll on the health of South Carolinians and its human and financial costs are enormous.

An estimated 13.4% of all adults in South Carolina have the disease (2019¹): they are at risk for complications such as heart and kidney disease that can severely reduce the quality and length of life. An additional 34.9% of South Carolina adults have prediabetes², which increases risk for heart disease and carries a very high risk progressing to actual diabetes.

In financial terms, diabetes imposes a staggering burden of $11,000 every minute on our state³. And while its overall impact is staggering, Black South Carolinians suffer disproportionately: research shows 16.4% of Black adults have diabetes compared with 11.3% of white adults⁴. Even worse, Black individuals have more than double the risk of dying from diabetes that white individuals (46.5 vs. 18.9 deaths per 100,000 respectively, 2017-2019⁵).

Diabetes Free SC (DFSC) is a long-term, statewide initiative that aims to transform the health of South Carolinians, with a particular emphasis on promoting equity, and reducing disparities in access and quality of diabetes prevention, education, and care. Launched in 2020, a key aim of this effort is to support and align existing efforts against diabetes, in order to gain efficiencies of scale and foster collaboration.

In addition, DFSC aims for statewide, population-level change through innovative strategies that take maximum advantage of new technologies. Since diabetes does silent damage to the human body over years or decades, we focus on early interventions to prolong healthy life. Funding for DFSC projects is from the BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Foundation; accordingly, there is a major focus on health disparities and on improved health for under-resourced communities.

Strategic Directions

• To improve pregnancy outcomes and the health of women with diabetes
• To reduce lifelong risk of diabetes in children
• To prevent diabetes and its complications in adults

Guiding Principles

• Implement an innovative, multi-pronged statewide program
• Align, develop and bring to scale existing programs that have proven local efficacy
• Reduce health disparities related to preventing diabetes and its complications
• Focus on diabetes prevention
• Focus on early life intervention to prevent or mitigate diabetes and its complications
• Ensure rigorous data collection
• Plan for the sustainability of initiative efforts

Citations

1. Diabetes Prevalence, 2019. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. CDC.
2. The Burden of Diabetes in South Carolina (2020). American Diabetes Association. http://main.diabetes.org/dorg/docs/state-fact-sheets/ADV_2020_State_Fact_sheets_SC.pdf
3. Diabetes in SC (2020) SC DHEC. https://scdhec.gov/sites/default/files/Library/CR-012453.pdf
4. Diabetes Prevalence, 2011-2019. Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System. SC DHEC.
5. Diabetes Mortality, 2017-2019. Vital Statistics. SC DHEC.