DRWF Events: The diabetes community “united” at United Through Diabetes
Following the recent United Through Diabetes educational event we are sharing a series of interviews from the day with leading healthcare professionals and people working in diabetes.
We hope everyone who attended the recent United Through Diabetes event had a great day with us and went home with the tools, knowledge, practical skills, and confidence to enhance your diabetes self-management and overall health and wellbeing.
The event Digital Hub provides an opportunity to recap on content from the day, plus access even more content to help you manage your diabetes – for both attendees and those who were not able to attend but would like to find out more.
DRWF interviews from United Through Diabetes: Organising the event with the DRWF team.
Sarah Tutton, Chief Executive, DRWF
“It has been a fantastic day. Our aim is to create a three-dimensional platform where we bring the diabetes community and diabetes and related healthcare professionals and the research community together so that we can share new information, learn new information, meet new contacts and make new friends. I think the feedback so far has been that it has been a tremendous day. There were lots of highlights for everyone because everyone comes with a very different agenda, and I hope that everyone has gone home today having fulfilled those needs.”
Lee Calladine, Event Co-ordinator, DRWF
“We have got colleagues, healthcare professional colleagues that we have worked with for years. We have a great relationship with them, so they understand the needs of the charity and the audience. We know that we can rely on them to cover the topics that that we decide that we're going to put on the programme each particular year.
“We also want to bring in younger healthcare professionals, up-and-coming healthcare professionals in the diabetes community, and other experts, because there is so many topics to cover. We need to expand and bring in experts in those areas.
“We want information and support for every single audience, with programme streams for diverse communities.”
Sanjay Gohil, Associate, DRWF
“Speaking to members of the diabetes community gives us great insight into what the need is for the daily clinical management of diabetes. We are creating an environment for more people to attend events like this to gain knowledge and help their daily self-management of diabetes and their health generally going forward.
“We are also very keen to speak to more healthcare professionals and present our work in terms of research, keeping people well, and creating bigger visibility across all communities, both healthcare professionals and the wider community.”
Last year, Sarah, you brought quite a few of the researchers here because I think people don't see that side of the charity's work, and more researchers again this year. So, can you explain why that's so important?
DRWF Researchers
Sarah Tutton: “For us as a charity, supporting medical research and using voluntary donations and public gifts to enable us to support that research, is important for a number of reasons. One is to ensure that our donors and committed supporters can see that we are spending their money in the way that we said we wanted to spend it.
“By funding clinical and non-clinical research fellowships and one year pump priming projects. It is really important from a research point of view, that everyone understands the importance at the part that charities play in making some of this research happen, because very clearly there is a lack of funding at government level to enable all of this research that needs to be done.
“We wanted to create an environment whereby some of our researchers, particularly those that work in basic science and non-clinical research, who do not often get the opportunity to talk to the patient community, the diabetes community, about the work that they are carrying out. People could openly ask how is their research going to benefit them in the future? I think that's what we have created today, and hopefully that is what we have shared with our diabetes community.”
Supporting researchers working in diabetes
Sarah Tutton: “It can very often be that if the right sort of funding is not available, we are potentially losing the diabetes researchers of the future. And that is why keeping our funding available for early career researchers is really important for the diabetes research community.”
Thank you for listening to this Living With Diabetes special podcast report from United Through Diabetes 2024, presented by Claire Levy and brought to you by DRWF.
Visit the DRWF United Through Diabetes Digital Hub for more information and resources from the day
Listen to our interviews with key speakers and sponsors on our audio interviews page
For news on all upcoming DRWF events please visit the event page
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