Diabetes conferences are great for providing an interesting insight into clinicians as patients, and this week’s Diabetes UK Annual Professional Conference in Liverpool is no exception.

The sheer prevalence of type-2 diabetes means that many of the GPs, hospital specialists, nurses and other healthcare workers at the conference have diabetes themselves. And those who don’t are likely to have a relative or friend with the disease.

In talk after talk, you find that medical training doesn’t exempt clinicians from the problems facing other people with diabetes. Delays in diagnosis, struggles to achieve good control and difficulties incorporating lifestyle changes into everyday routines are all part of the same picture.

But these struggles also seem to help professionals see the difficulties that patients face in maintaining good health when living a long-term condition.

There also seems to be a high prevalence of type-1 diabetes among those at diabetes conferences than would be the case among other similar groups of adults. My guess would be that diagnosis early in life can spark an interest in medicine, but it would interesting to know if this is the case.

The organisers also take the fact that attendees are likely to have diabetes into account, with nutritional information on all the lunches (crucial for those on carbohydrate-counting regimens), fruit in meal packs and water, rather than sugary soft drinks, on offer.

There is also the conference-floor contribution from those at the conference -  the unusually high number of people bringing out blood testing kits and insulin pens before lunch, giving us the chance to see the fares being proffered on dozens of stands around the conference doing the work they were designed to do.