The Diabetes UK Professional Conference landed in Liverpool this year, bringing together over 2,000 diabetes professionals across three days at Exhibition Centre Liverpool. I attended Wednesday 22 and Thursday 23 April, and came away with a lot to think about both from the sessions I attended and the conversations that happen in the margins.

My own contribution to the program centered on Levemir discontinuation, a topic that's been generating no small amount of anxiety across clinical teams. I spoke on both days, which gave me the chance to revisit some of the key messages with different audiences and field questions that reflected just how varied the challenges are across settings. There's no single clean answer here the right basal substitute depends on the individual patient, their injection device, their history, and what's actually available and funded locally. Those conversations on the floor confirmed that colleagues are hungry for practical guidance, not just high-level reassurance that alternatives exist.

There was a personal highlight too spotting my name on a poster presentation in the exhibition hall. It's one of those moments that catches you off guard, and I won't pretend it wasn't a good feeling.

This year's conference had a notable emphasis on health inequalities, with the theme of 'no one is left behind' running through the opening plenary, delivered by Professor Kamlesh Khunti. That lens applied in different ways across the sessions access to technology, disparities in structured education, and the realities of delivering care to people who don't fit neatly into trial populations or guideline assumptions.

The program also covered diabetes technology disparities in children and young people with type 1 diabetes, and sessions on getting the diabetes diagnosis right from the outset, including differentiating type 1 from type 2 and monogenic diabetes. The technology access question is one that comes up constantly in inpatient and specialist nurse practice the gap between what's available and what's equitably distributed remains wide.

The exhibition hall had a different feel this year. Pharmaceutical companies were situated behind a large physical partition, with access restricted to specific health care professionals only. For health care professionals without prescribing rights, that effectively meant a significant portion of the exhibition was off-limits. I understand the regulatory logic, but in practice it created a two-tier experience that sat uncomfortably. It's a dynamic that Diabetes UK need to pay attention to as these access restrictions become more formalised, the wider healthcare team maybe reluctant to attend if they are not able to have full access.