Sport & Diabetes

Background In the Sports&Diabets project the stress is put on enabling children living with Type 1 Diabetes to do sport or enabling to continue when diagnosed, by educating all stakeholders how to handle risk concerning diabetes and reduce fears that lead to exclusion. A lot of children stop doing sports when they are diagnosed due to various reasons, predominantly, it is either because of the lack of knowledge of coaches and teacher in how to handle children with diabetes and the fear of parents. Objectives The partners set out to create a simple, comprehensive, and easy-to-use publication that provides information about the basics of doing sport when living with diabetes. This enables all persons living with diabetes to participate in sport activities, should contribute to debunking the stigma that one cannot practice sports if they have diabetes. Also, it can serve as a step-by-step tool for everybody who is interested in the topic of diabetes and engaging in different types of physical activity. Implementation The publication was created through a series of interconnected steps starting with the survey on the knowledge of doing sport with Type 1 Diabetes. Then the expert group was created that through extensive personal knowledge and research created the first version of the publication. The material was tested by partner organisations through a series of focus groups/workshops, and the final Camp after which the final version of the material was created using all the gathered feedback. Achievements The results consist of 5 tangible outputs: 1. Survey results; 2. Guidebook - Tackling Diabetes with Sport; 3. Comic book - Super D tackling sport; 4. Charts for helping with diabetes management; 5. Tips and tricks from Super D heroes. But actually, the biggest result of our project is the huge impact it had on the diabetes community in the whole world where the interest for translating the materials was expressed for an additional 22 languages which will be available on the project website.