Professionals
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Born in Moreton, Wirral, Cheshire in 1922.
Occupation: Nurse

Overview: Joan Jones trained as a nurse during the Second World War. She first encountered diabetes during fever training at an isolation hospital in 1940 and then among war casualties in London. When she was midwifery sister in Dulwich in the early 1950s, mothers with diabetes had been warned to avoid pregnancy and expected their babies to be stillborn; but at Birmingham Maternity Hospital from 1955 - where a diabetic clinic was run jointly by John Malins and obstetrician Samuel Davidson - most babies lived. As a district sister in Coleshill from 1963-82, she helped many elderly patients with diabetes.

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Healthcare Professionals 
Here you can listen to 30 healthcare professionals - doctors, nurses, dietitians, podiatrists and one lay educator � recalling memories of every aspect of their working lives. They talk about their relationships with patients and colleagues as well as changes in treatment, technology, and the health service. The earliest memory is from 1940 and the most recent from 2008.

The interviewees include some pioneers in diabetes care, but also those who had little specialist knowledge � to match the wide range of care described by people with diabetes who had already been recorded for this website.

Some of the people with diabetes describe being treated by pioneers such as R.D. Lawrence, co-founder of the British Diabetic Association, but others were treated by people who were not specialists, including family doctors (GPs) who had rarely encountered diabetes. Our aim was to choose interviewees who would represent the variety of care provided over a period of nearly 70 years.

Those who had already written about their work were asked to provide a selection of up to 12 of their publications. (Click on Publications on their individual page.) However, these interviews are not primarily about scientific developments already well documented, but rather about how these developments affected � or did not affect - the daily lives of healthcare professionals and their patients.

(In addition to 25 interviews that are mainly about professional experience, we have included in this section 2 interviews with people with diabetes and 3 with family members who have also been involved in diabetes care.)
 
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