Diabetes Talkback: Vol 2 No 1

As healthcare professionals striving to improve clinical practice, enhance management strategies and stay up to date with everything going on around us, it is sometimes easy to lose track of the experience of diabetes from the patient’s perspective. How do they feel? What are they going through? How do they respond to what we say and do? Diabetes & Primary Care hopes to address this concern by initiating a revolutionary new section that offers people with diabetes the chance to interact with healthcare professionals.

The person with diabetes will be at the heart of each Talkback section. His/her experiences of diabetes care will be sent for review to different members of the primary care team. Their responses will be sent back to the person with diabetes, who can then offer their own perspective on this feedback. The whole interactive process will be presented within the pages of Diabetes & Primary Care. Comments will be invited from readers on the different perspectives and possibly published in subsequent issues.

As well as being of relevance and interest to readers, we hope this section will act as a continual reminder that, even in times of escalating management, accountability and responsibility issues, we should never lose sight of the importance of our personal interaction with the person with diabetes.