Many young people living with type 1 diabetes struggle with the burden of day-to-day self-management. As a result they often have poor outcomes including the development of life-changing complications. We have formed a partnership between existing diabetes service providers (in Galway University Hospitals), academics in NUI Galway (and elsewhere) and Jigsaw Galway, a youth mental health service in our city. We are attempting to come up with a better model of care for young adults living with type 1 diabetes. In the proposed KEDS we intend to expand our existing partnership to include other providers of diabetes care in Ireland and internationally and other national and international researchers with expertise in this area and lay representatives. We intend to present the findings of our current research including the results of a systematic review, observations made through interviews with young adults and their carers and lessons learned through forming a Young Adult Panel. In this way we hope to widen the scope of our research and also to get other service providers to think about how they might improve services locally. A key output from our KEDS-funded international conference will be agreement on a new approach to care delivery that can be piloted in a future study.
