Diabetes is a life-long condition that can be diagnosed at any age. Children and young people diagnosed with diabetes are from all backgrounds, places, communities, and countries.
With effective diagnosis and treatment, it is possible to manage diabetes successfully, and for people with diabetes to live long and healthy lives. Unfortunately, when diabetes care is less good, there can be severe health outcomes, including damage to the eyes, kidneys and blood vessels. In the worst cases, this can lead to loss of vision, kidney failure, and limb amputation.
At the moment, standard diabetes treatments seem to work better for some children and young people than others.
In particular, children and young people from diverse backgrounds, including ethnic minority backgrounds, and economically deprived backgrounds, more often have less good treatment outcomes.
We want to make treatments that work better for children and young people with diabetes from diverse backgrounds.
To do that, we first need to talk with children and young people with diabetes from diverse backgrounds, and their families, to find out more about how standard treatments are working, and why they are working less well.
Then, we want to work with children and young people with diabetes and their families from diverse backgrounds to develop new treatments, that might work better to help manage diabetes successfully.