DRWF Events: Healthcare professionals and patients share experience to educate diabetes doctors
Teaching medicine through lived experience to help shape the next generation of doctors.
When doctors, professors and people living with type 1 diabetes have an opportunity to teach side-by-side, medical education becomes something richer than the transfer of clinical knowledge alone.
The occasion becomes an encounter where science meets daily life, evidence is balanced with the lived experience, and where future clinicians experience the realities that their patients often navigate every day.
The Specialist Diabetes Team at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust recognised the importance of this approach back in 2013 when a team of professionals and a person living with type 1 diabetes came together to deliver their first lecture in this new style.
The meeting involved Lee Calladine, Events Coordinator at DRWF, who is also living with type 1 diabetes and has been repeated annually ever since.
Healthcare professionals involved include Professor Richard IG Holt, MA MB BChir PhD FRCP FHEA, Professor in Diabetes and Endocrinology and Human Development and Health; Professor Chris Byrne, MB BCh (Wales) FRCP(UK) FRCPath (UK) PhD (Cantab), Professor in Endocrinology and Metabolism; and Dr Mayank Patel, Consultant in Diabetes, Quality in Care Award winner for Outstanding Educator in Diabetes, Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer and DRWF Editorial Advisory Board Member.
Professor Rami Salib, Chair of Otorhinolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, Professor of Rhinology, Consultant ENT Surgeon at University Hospital Southampton said: “We are extremely grateful for Lee for dedicating time to help educate our future junior doctors in this hugely important area. Having a personal patient perspective is hugely beneficial and insightful. The students have consistently reflected this sentiment and their appreciation in their feedback of Lee's contributions over the years that I have been CLS (common learning space) lead.”
Constant attention needed
Type 1 diabetes is a complex condition that demands constant daily decision-making.
From carbohydrate-counting and insulin dose adjustment to blood glucose monitoring and lifestyle factors, such as exercise and activity, managing type 1 diabetes requires a level of day-to-day judgement that is often invisible to those outside it. Additional factors include managing illness and stress, sleep, driving rules, work and shifts, food choices and much more.
Recent medical resources have underlined the importance of strengthening professional education in type 1 diabetes care, arguing that healthcare professionals themselves should be thoroughly educated if they are to support patients well in a rapidly-changing clinical landscape.
At the same time, research on lived experience has shown that students benefit when teaching goes beyond lectures and includes insight into what it means to live with a long-term chronic health condition.
Lee said: “A teaching model that brings together diabetes doctors, academic experts and people with a lived experience of diabetes feels so timely.”
Doctors can explain physiology, diagnosis, treatment pathways and the management of acute and long-term risks.
Professors can place that knowledge within a broader educational and research framework, helping students understand not only what to know, but how to think critically, interpret evidence and practise responsibly.
Adding lived experience
A person with lived experience adds something equally essential: a grounded account of the decisions, adjustments, frustrations and resilience that no textbook can fully capture.
For medical students, this kind of teaching can be quietly transformative. It can challenge any lingering assumption that expertise sits only at the front of the lecture theatre or in the clinic. Students begin to see that people living with chronic and long-term conditions are not passive recipients of care, but experts in the practical realities of their own condition.
In type 1 diabetes especially, where self-management shapes outcomes constantly, listening closely to lived experience can deepen clinical understanding as much as it deepens empathy. It can also prepare future doctors to communicate more respectfully and make decisions more collaboratively with their patients.
The significance of this approach extends beyond one classroom or one condition.
Across medicine, there is growing recognition that patient-centred care depends not only on clinical competence, but also on the ability to understand how illness is lived.
Editorial and research literature in diabetes and endocrinology has increasingly argued for the voices of lived experience to be heard more clearly in education, research and service design.
In that sense, bringing together clinicians, academics and a person with type 1 diabetes is not an optional extra or a symbolic gesture; it is a serious educational method, aligned with the wider movement towards more meaningful, collaborative healthcare.
Lee said: “There is something powerful about future doctors learning not just from those who treat diabetes, but from someone who lives with it every day. In that shared teaching space, medicine becomes more complete. The science remains vital, but it is strengthened by humanity, humility and partnership. For students, the lesson is likely to last far beyond the classroom: good medicine is not only about knowing the condition but about understanding the person who carries it.
“That meeting of perspectives is helping shape a more informed, compassionate and effective generation of doctors.”
“Invaluable opportunity”
Dr Patel said: “For medical students, to have an education session, co-delivered by someone living with type 1 diabetes, healthcare professionals and academic colleagues, offers an invaluable opportunity to see the whole picture, how the diabetes science translates to lived experience. It provides a forum for them to add their earlier science only based learning, by hearing from someone who lives what they have only read about, as well as being to ask open questions that the books cannot answer. They also will then hopefully graduate as doctors with a larger appreciation of their patients living with a long-term condition and the need for understanding and appropriate communication skills.”
Professor Byrne said: “I would like to express my gratitude to Lee, who has generously given his time and experience to help teach the University’s next generation of doctors. For more than a decade it has been a privilege to interact with Lee in the lecture theatre and demonstrate to the students the important aspects of living with diabetes, such as diabetic ketoacidosis, complications, and care, illustrated by Lee’s real-life experiences as an expert patient.”
Professor Holt said: “During the second year, our students spend a week learning the fundamentals of diabetes, from the physiology of glucose metabolism to the principles of clinical management. Yet understanding diabetes involves far more than mastering its biological principles. By sharing his experience of living with diabetes, Lee provides insights that cannot be found in textbooks. His contribution helps students appreciate the human realities of the condition, adding a depth of understanding that will serve them well as future clinicians caring for people with diabetes.”
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