Students could save lives after becoming Diabetes UK Community Champions


A team of students have finished their training to becomes Diabetes UK Community Champions - meaning they can work in the community and help people manage the potentially deadly condition.

Diabetes UK is the leading UK charity for raising awareness and supporting those who have had, or are at risk of, a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis. The condition affects three million people in the UK and the number of people who have the condition has risen by 60 per cent over the past decade. People with Type 2 diabetes have too much blood sugar and can lead to loss of vision, limbs and heart disease.

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DMU's nine student volunteers began their training at the start of April. They had their final assessments at Leicester’s Peepul Centre where they successfully completed their training and became fully fledged Community Champions for the charity.

Their first job was at an awareness day in Highcross shopping centre in Leicester where they were able to talk to people about diabetes, help them see if they were at risk and talk about the role they are aiming to play in the community.

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Neha Rana, one of the Community Champions and a final year Pharmacy student at DMU, is looking forward to getting out and putting her new skills into practice.

She said: “I’m really looking forward to being a Community Champion. Now we are able to calculate people’s BMIs (body-mass index) and that’s how you identify the risk of type 2 diabetes so we can refer them to a GP to get glucose tested.

“There are people that don’t have a lot of information about diabetes; many don’t even know what the symptoms are. But being able to give this information could lead to a diagnosis. If for instance someone has had it for years but never known and we step in at the right time, then that’d be potentially lifesaving.”

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Dr Ketan Ruparelia, research technician at DMU, will be leading the team out in the community. He said: “We’ve all done our risk assessment training and now we’ll get certificates to show that. Everybody came through the assessment and they’ll all be confident to go out and be risk assessors.

“Now that we have our training and the background information from Diabetes UK, we have everything we need to go out and deliver.

“We now have the ability to refer people to their GPs and that’s how we can make a difference.

“The students are all very keen; they’re loving the interaction and the sharing of the information. Some of them are graduates, some are current students, but they’re all enjoying it so much.”

The project to develop the students into Community Champions with Diabetes UK has been run in association with DMU Square Mile, the university’s community outreach programme which works to share the skills of staff and students to help the community.

Ketan added: “DMU Square Mile is the perfect platform for us to go out and make a difference. If it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t have been able to have that impact.”

Posted on Monday 24 August 2015

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