Today is World Diabetes Day
14 November is World Diabetes Day. This day commemorates the birthday of Sir Frederick Banting, the scientist who first discovered, isolated and administered insulin in one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in history.
But, let’s go back a few years ago…
In 2020, from within EMCA member clubs (European Multusport Club Association) specifically the clubs HAŠK Mladost and TSV Bayer Leverkusen a project “Sports&Diabetes – Tackling Diabetes with Sports” was started.
In this project the stress was put on enabling children with diabetes to do sport by educating all stakeholders how to handle risk concerning diabetes and reduce fears that lead to exclusion of children with diabetes.
In collaboration with IDF Europe (International Diabetes Federation region Europe) as well as Lazio, Olympiacos and WSC a comprehensive handbook “Tackling Diabetes with Sport” and a comic book for children “Super D tackling sport” that quickly educates all stakeholders and enables all children with diabetes to do or continue sport activities was created. These two publications are part of the EMCA Studia which is an initiative created by EMCA to gather knowledge and recommendations in the field off sport that were created either by EMCA or our member clubs.
The huge success of this project in terms of interest being shown to translate the handbook to approximately 20 languages and the comments received from within the diabetes family prompted us to continue working on this topic.
You can download and/or order the handbook and the comic book online for free here.
Project “Diabetes Digital Peer S(up)port” came as a result, a further milestone of the previous Sports&Diabetes project where it was identified that:
- more in-depth, tailored training of coaches is required to optimally support people living with Diabetes type 1 (PwD), and
- that PwD would very much benefit from a place where they could ask for support of their own peers.
Idea of this project is to create a digital solution where knowledge and experiences of doing sport with diabetes can be found and shared. This digital community would be a place where people living with diabetes, coaches, parents, and experts from the fields of diabetes, sport, medicine, nutrition… could offer peer support: meet, share and get knowledge, experience, tips&tricks, help with problems and answer specific questions to help with encouraging and keeping people living with diabetes in sport.
The goal is to offer a tool where they can seek the knowledge on their own finding the basic and additional resources on doing sport with diabetes, but also share the knowledge in between.
Submit your application for the participation in this new project at the link here.
Activities under the project that are done during the November as the full month is the Diabetes Awareness Month:
Tuesday, 14 November 2023: EMCA and TSV Bayer promoting World Diabetes Day
In the light of the World Diabetes Day EMCA will share and promote their own and their member clubs activities connected to this topic. While TSV Bayer has made a video about their athlete living with diabetes type 1 and sharing her experience of managing diabetes during sports activities. You can check out the video here soon.
Tuesday, 14 November 2023, 16:00 CET: World Diabetes Day #docday° with IDF Europe
Wednesday, 22 November 2023, 14:00 CET: HAŠK Mladost will have an online seminar for coaches and sport workers
The next step by HAŠK Mladost in this project will be to educate a wider audience about the importance of understanding the specifics of training the kids and youth with diabetes. They will hold an online seminar where our medical expert, dr. prof. Maja Cigrovski Berković will give a lecture for coaches and sport workers. On ‘the stage’ she will be joined by Krešimir Čač a swimming coach and his swimmer Marin Kučić Mirković whos points of view have been changed after participating in the focus groups of our project ‘S&D Tackling Diabetes with Sport’. The moderator of the seminar will be Ines Jakopanec.
The seminar will be in Croatian, and all interested can join at the link here.
