The Diabetes Action Canada team returned from the 2025 Diabetes Canada Professional Conference feeling energized, and inspired by the connections and conversations that shaped a great week. This annual gathering remains one of the few moments where our national community can come together in person, off Zoom, out of email, and reconnect as colleagues, partners, and friends working toward better outcomes for people living with diabetes across Canada.

Bringing the Community Together

This Conference is always a highlight on our calendar. A special thank you to Diabetes Canada for hosting yet another great event. The program created space to share new science, learn from one another, and strengthen relationships that make progress possible. For our team, the week reaffirmed just how powerful patient-oriented research can be when lived experience guides the work.

A Standout Moment: The DAC Breakfast

One of the best parts of the week for our team was our Diabetes Action Canada Breakfast, where the 2025–26 Research-to-Action Fellowship cohort presented their projects. Each Fellow showcased a resource, story, or tool built with, and led by, our Patient Partners, offering creative, practical ways to bring research evidence into everyday life.

You can meet our Fellows here 👉 https://diabetesaction.ca/fellowship-2025-cohort/

Fellowship Project Highlights

1. Stigma Project
Partner: Australian Centre for Behavioural Research in Diabetes

• Who: Brit Hancock and Fizza Abbas
• What: When Words Hurt and When They Heal: A Nursing Toolkit on Diabetes Stigma – a training workshop for medical and nursing students focused on empathetic, non-stigmatizing diabetes care. Using real stories, it shows how shame, blame, and stigma surface in clinical encounters and how better language can shift experiences.
• Why: Directly supports Diabetes Canada’s Change the Conversation campaign and strengthens international collaboration on reducing diabetes stigma.

2. Misdiagnosis Project
Partner: Indigenous Diabetes Health Circle

• Who: Jeremy Auger and Anmol Budhiraja
• What: Diabetes Answers for Us: Pocket Cards for Clinic Visits – small, easy-to-use cards reminding people of their rights in the doctor’s office and the questions to ask. They list key diagnostic tests, explain results in plain language, and help people connect symptoms to possible diabetes to get appropriate follow-up.
• Why: Builds self-advocacy, improves health literacy, and supports culturally grounded diabetes care within Indigenous communities..

3. Women’s Health & Diabetes Project
Partner: Tidepool

• Who: Maryann Maloney and Wajeeha Cheema
• What: Things I Learned the Hard Way: Women’s Health & Diabetes Book –  a storytelling e-book sharing first-person experiences across reproductive and hormonal life stages. Drawing on stories from women and gender-diverse people in more than eight countries, it blends lived experience with evidence and practical guidance on diagnosis, puberty, pregnancy, parenting, work, menopause, and aging.
• Why: Elevates women’s voices and advances patient-driven innovation with an internationally respected nonprofit.

4. Cell Therapy 101 Project
Partner: Alberta Diabetes Institute

• Who: Alex St. John and Emily Burke-Hall
• What: Cell Therapy 101: Plain-Language Carousels – a three-part infographic series explaining the past, present, and future of cell therapy. It highlights key milestones from the Edmonton Protocol to today’s innovations, outlining benefits, risks, and gaps. The series is grounded in insights from more than 12 transplant recipients to show the real-life impact of this evolving field.
• Why: Makes highly technical science accessible for people living with diabetes, supporting Diabetes Canada’s commitment to patient-friendly education.

5. AID-101 Project
Partner: Children with Diabetes

• Who: Amanda Knight and Najeeb Ashraf
• What: Pick My Pump: AI Diabetes Tech Chatbot. an AI-powered tool to help parents and adults compare diabetes technologies. It draws only from verified manuals and summarized device information (no web scraping, no guessing) to support informed choices about pumps and algorithms.
• Why: Responds to a rapidly growing need for clear, unbiased guidance on diabetes technology, a priority for patients, caregivers, and clinicians.

Want to contribute or test some of these projects?
Try our beta tools here 👉 https://linktr.ee/diabetesactioncanada

The room was buzzing with questions, ideas, and new collaborations. It was wonderful to watch our Fellows throughout the week; asking smart questions, sharing their expertise on patient engagement, and connecting with researchers from across Canada. They are a remarkable group and truly represent the next generation of trained patient partners.

Honouring a Leader: Dr. Catharine Whiteside

Another highlight for our team was joining the celebration of Dr. Catharine Whiteside in her retirement. Dr. Whiteside has shaped the diabetes research landscape in Canada in ways that are hard to quantify, but easy to feel. Her leadership, high standards, and unwavering belief in meaningful patient partnership have influenced countless researchers, programs, and organizations. It was truly special to see her honoured by a community she has supported, mentored, and strengthened for so many years.

Spotlight Panel: Low Priority and the Power of Storytelling

A major highlight of the conference was the premiere of Low Priority (Low 2), an arts-based film grounded in the lived experience of people navigating diabetes while facing homelessness, housing instability, or dealing with unstable living conditions and limited support. Co-created with co-researchers from the Calgary Diabetes Advocacy Committee (CDAC), a group of people with lived experience of both diabetes and homelessness, the film exposes realities that rarely appear in clinical guidelines, research papers, or policy frameworks.

The first film, Low, premiered in 2023 and follows Bobby, a person living with type 1 diabetes and navigating the shelter system. It opened conversations about the emotional, social, and practical realities of managing diabetes without a stable home, and the stigma and unconscious bias that can lead to serious adverse events.

Low Priority (Low 2) continues Bobby’s journey as he moves through the hospital system. The film shines a light on what happens in emergency rooms when someone has no fixed address, how assumptions and unconscious bias shape interactions with healthcare workers, how delays in treatment occur, and how the system is simply not designed for people who are managing both diabetes and homelessness. It asks us to confront how quickly snap judgments and structural gaps can lead to real consequences for those already living at the margins.

The panel brought together the filmmaking team, CDAC co-researchers, clinicians, and researchers to discuss how storytelling can:

• build empathy and reduce stigma
• surface realities that rarely make it into clinical guidelines
• push us to rethink how care is delivered
• deepen our understanding of what truly person-centred care requires

As always, the most powerful insights came from the co-researchers who shaped these films. Their voices, leadership, and generosity are what make this work so impactful.

If you haven’t seen Low you can want the film on our website here:

👉 https://diabetesaction.ca/low/

A Month of Reflection and Gratitude

The conference also coincided with the end of Diabetes Month, an opportunity for our team to pause and appreciate everyone who makes progress possible:

• the scientists and clinicians whose work turned insulin from an idea into lifesaving reality
• the patient partners who ask the hardest and most important questions: “What does this mean in real life?”
• the communities who continually share their stories, time, and trust

From Nobel Prize winning discoveries to modern, co-designed tools and films, progress in diabetes has always relied on partnership.

Looking Ahead

We left this year’s conference inspired by the energy, generosity, and commitment of the diabetes community and incredibly proud of how our Fellows, Patient Partners, and team showed up throughout the week.

Thank you to everyone who joined our sessions, connected with our Fellows, or engaged in conversations about patient-oriented research. We can’t wait to carry this momentum into the year ahead.

Already counting down to next year...Vancouver here we come!