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This website presents 100 audio interviews with people with diabetes, members of their families and healthcare professionals.
  New interviews, with family members and healthcare professionals, have been added to the original interviews with people with diabetes. The original interviews can still be found easily by clicking on the menu above or button below.

They talk with passion and humour about their experiences from the late 1920s until the first decade of the 21st century and provide a unique oral history of life with diabetes and changes in treatment over eight decades. 

Their stories are offered as a resource for historians, healthcare professionals, people with diabetes and their families, and all those interested in the ways people remember and make sense of their lives. This resource is available free, but by using this site you are agreeing to our terms of use.  

We provide full unedited recordings, short audio samples, written summaries, full transcripts, an inter-active database, and facilities to search for words, phrases and subjects. The menu also includes a glossary and a page of items provided by the interviewees (Extras).

The transcripts contain notes of slips of the tongue and other mistakes and omissions, but we recommend listening to the voices too, because accents, intonations and emphases convey more than writing.

The website is based at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDEM) and was funded by the Wellcome Trust. It has won Oxford University's 'IT in Teaching and Learning Award' and been chosen by the Wellcome Trust as a 'Research Highlight


Getting Started
The interviews are divided into three categories.  If you want to search one of these and read an introduction to it, then click on your chosen category below.



Interview (random selection)
 


Born in Burton-on-Trent in 1968.
Occupation: Nurse

Overview: Barbara was one of the last generations to qualify as a nurse without a university degree. After training at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, from 1988-91, she was a staff nurse on general medical wards until 1996, when she began to specialise in diabetes at the University Hospital in Selly Oak, Birmingham. Since then, she has been called variously a Diabetes Nurse Educator, a Diabetes Specialist Nurse and a Clinical Nurse Specialist. Although she feels well-qualified by experience, she would like to take a degree. Another ambition is to provide more culturally-specific care for patients who share her Caribbean background.

  Click [Here] to view
 

 


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