Professionals
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Born in Bury, Lancs in 1956.
Occupation: Dietitian

Overview: Gillian McGuinness studied human physiology at Manchester University before doing an eighteen-month Diploma in Dietetics at Hollings College in 1977, when there was a ‘dire shortage of dietitians`. She worked in NHS and private hospitals in Manchester and Bristol and then at Birmingham Children`s Hospital from 1990. She remembers that in the late 1970s, children with diabetes didn`t always grow very well or get full employment opportunities or take for granted that they would have children, whereas now she expects them to live long healthy lives and be able to achieve all the same things as people without 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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