T1DCC at the Diabetes UK Professional Conference 2018

Last week I was able to sneak in to the halcyon halls of the Diabetes UK Professional Conference for the day.

I have been appointed as one of three PWD/people with diabetes/diabetic/lay/patient* representatives on the ABCD T1DCC. Oh yes. A PWD on the ABCD T1DCC - that's me! Diabetes is all about the abbreviations, and why bother with inclusive language when you can just spout forth with endless baffling acronyms and confuse people - that's what I say!

*whichever irritates you the least

The ABCD is the Association of British Clinical Diabetologists, and their T1DCC is the Type 1 Clinical Collaborative, which was being officially launched at a presentation on Wednesday afternoon. You can find out more about the collaborative here but essentially it is an initiative that seeks to support and improve care in type 1 diabetes, sharing best practice, guidance and support for healthcare professionals working in the UK. The T1DCC seeks to support improvement across 6 areas:

• Pumps and technologies
• Health care professional education, training and workforce issues
• Patient education
• Whole of life
• Enabling success
• Quality improvement

and along with two other pancreatically challenged types I am looking forward to chipping-in to the discussions and conversations as they arise.

The T1DCC presentation was divided into short sections. Chair Rob Gregory introduced the Collaborative itself. Emma Wilmot shared new downloadable Diabetes Technology Network 'best practice' guides for insulin pump therapy in adult clinics and also for inpatient settings. Anne Kilvert shared about quality improvement and the T1 Services Audit. Helen Hopkinson spoke about DAFNEplus which builds on the success of the UKs foremost educational programme for people with T1. Sophie Harris gave a presentation outlining the power of peer support networks for PWD, and how t1resources.uk can offer clinicians and PWD a set of searchable, trusted resources. Partha Kar spoke about the possibility of an emerging digital platform for T1D. The session ended with a panel discussion.

If your name's not on the list, you're not coming in

As is customary with the Diabetes UK Professional Conference there was a good deal of difficulty with being allowed in as a mere person with diabetes (which is always put down to some obscure rule about pharma being explicitly forbidden to advertise directly to members of the public, which tickled me as I saw this pharmaceutical advert on the way to the conference). However the PWD reps were allowed to attend as we were listed as 'speakers' at the presentation, so I was able to arrive a little early and managed to get to see some excellent sessions.

Widening access
To their credit, Diabetes UK did try something radically different this year in terms of widening access to some of the conference content to non-professionals. An extra 'Insider' day of the conference was added on the Saturday, which was only open to people affected by diabetes and condensed some of the main conference sessions from the previous 3 days. Everyone's second favourite Nightscout-Guru-Diabetes-Dad, Kev Winchcombe has written a rather good post about the Insider day. DUK also invited a couple of familiar PWD peeps to tweet from the main conference itself, so more of the content was shared, which I for one was very glad about. The lovely Ros from Type 1 Adventures writes about her take on the main conference and Insider event here.

Other stuff from the day
As with previous times when I have managed to attend the DUK Professional Conference, the day was an absolute whirlwind of fascinating sessions, with hastily grabbed coffees and chances to bump into familiar faces.

Psychological support
It was heartening to see the profile of psychological support being raised this year. The first session I caught was entitled 'Weaving psychological principles into routine care' with Debbie Cooke, Christel Hendrieckx, Jen Nash, Lisa Newson and Cathy Lloyd speaking about the pivotal importance of psychological support for people with long term conditions. There are downloadable resources from the Australian Centre for Behavioural Research in Diabetes (both for HCPs and people with diabetes) which are well worth checking out.

The discussion also extended to the language used in clinical interactions and looked to the #languagematters work underway nationally in the UK. 

Beyond A1c
A fascinating session about HbA1c, glucose variability, continuous data and 'time in range' which matched much of my lived experience. The suggestion from US clinician Ann Peters was that while HbA1c is still a useful research measure, it is increasingly being eclipsed by the usefulness and richness of continuous data. The same HbA1c can hide a multitude of different experiences of diabetes, and even significant challenges such as Severe Hypoglycaemia cannot effectively be predicted by A1c alone -  severe hypos can happen across a range of A1c's and have more to do with glucose variability than whether your HbA1c is above or below 7%.

Emma Wilmot's part of this session focussed on improving access to technology. She began with a slightly shocking statistic that the average UK HbA1c for someone with T1D is as high as the 'control' arm of the celebrated DCCT trial (1983-1993), which is still relied upon to show the benefits of intensive glucose therapy. For all the years that have past, fancy insulins that have been released, and technology that has begun to be adopted, on average people with type 1 diabetes in the UK are still only achieving those 'non-intensive' outcomes, with all the increased likelihood of diabetes complications as a result.

It was also heartening to hear in this session that our concept of what is meant by 'normal' blood glucose may be changing. When you are pretending to be your own pancreas it is easy to assume that 'nonnys' always exclusively live between 4.0 and 7.0mmol/L no matter what they do and what they eat. But as more people without diabetes are wearing continuous glucose monitors for a variety of different reasons it is becoming clear that even when you have a fully functioning pancreas there can still be quite significant glucose variation.

Inspired
Once again I left the Diabetes Professional Conference exhausted and genuinely inspired by the passion of healthcare professionals, researchers and academics.

It was wonderful to see an emphasis on person-first care, tailored to each individual. A desire to see the right technology used in the right way for the right people. To treat the whole person, body and mind to support them towards better self-care and better outcomes. It is clear that there is much left to be done, but the desire to make better progress is tangible.

Managing diabetes is a tricky old business, but these people really do care and really are seeking to improve outcomes for all of us pancreatically challenged types.

Disclaimer. Diabetes UK supplied me with a free one-day pass to the conference as a speaker. The T1DCC kindly paid for my train ticket which was very nice of them. I was not asked to, or paid to write this post. Your diabetes may vary. Blood sugar can go down as well as up.