Five year collaboration celebrates better quality of life for people with diabetes

Diabetes Victoria and Deakin University have renewed their collaboration agreement to support the Australian Centre for Behavioural Research in Diabetes (ACBRD) – a welcome present for the researchers who celebrate the ACBRD's fifth anniversary tonight (Thursday 30 April).

"Diabetes is not just a condition defined by numbers and biomedical risk factors; it places a high selfcare and emotional burden on the individual," ACBRD Foundation Director Professor Jane Speight says. "Through the ACBRD's work the emotional well-being of people with diabetes is being considered more widely."

The ACBRD was established as a collaboration between Diabetes Victoria and Deakin University in May 2010 and has since changed the way many people think and talk about diabetes. The ACBRD has also put questions around the quality of life of people with diabetes higher on the research agenda.

"While many researchers around Australia focus on how to prevent diabetes or on the psychosocial aspects of other chronic conditions, until the ACBRD was established, there was no national research centre focused solely on the behavioural and psychosocial challenges of living with diabetes.

Embedding the ACBRD in the offices of Diabetes Victoria has enabled its research to influence programs, services, policies, practices and even the language we use, to support people with diabetes," says Diabetes Victoria CEO Craig Bennett.

In just five years, the ACBRD has strengthened the profile of both founding partners by becoming a nationally and internationally-recognised research centre, a national voice and a national resource.

"We are delighted that the ACBRD has made such significant progress in just five years to promote holistic support to improve the quality of life of people with diabetes. We are immensely proud of the Centre's achievements and wish the Foundation Director, Professor Jane Speight, and her talented team further success in the future," says Professor Brendan Crotty, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Faculty of Health, Deakin University.

Since its inauguration, the ACBRD has been extremely busy and published numerous research papers and articles on living with type 1 diabetes or type 2 diabetes. The ACBRD's research agenda was greatly influenced by the landmark Diabetes MILES – Australia Study, a nationwide survey establishing the unmet psychosocial needs of adults with type 1 diabetes or type 2 diabetes. The recent Diabetes MILES Youth Study is surveying a new cohort of young people and parents, while MILES-2 is following up the original adult cohort and investigating new areas of interest.