Walkers take steps to seek cure for juvenile diabetes
KELLY Belcher takes part in the JDRF One Walk every year so other parents can learn the signs of type 1 diabetes.
Her son William Belcher was diagnosed with the disease when he was nine years old.
“Until my son was diagnosed eight years ago, I myself didn’t know anything about it, so I would like to encourage people to become familiar with the condition,” she said.
“At the moment there is no cure for type 1 diabetes. People with the condition have to endure multiple finger pricks each day to get a blood sugar reading, and give themselves multiple injections of insulin each day.”
She said the 2km JDRF One Walk raised vital funds for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
The walk will be held at the Cairns Fun Ship Park at 8.30am on Sunday, August 19.
Anyone who wants to get involved can register at walk.jdrf.org.au and should wear blue. CAIRNS Hospital’s code yellow is expected to be revoked by tomorrow.
The hospital’s Cairns services executive director Tina Chinery said the code yellow was put into place to deal with an influx of flu and sickness cases.
“In winter we usually experience an increase in demand for our services, and this is because of flu season and also because we have a lot of tourists in town,” she said.
“We have seen 200 people over the last four days present to our emergency department. Over the weekend we saw double the number of category one patients.”
She said calling a code yellow was a commonplace practice around this time of year.
“We do experience a surge in activity or demand for our services over February, and then really from July through to September,” she said.
“We use 380 beds in the summer and 400 beds in the winter.”
She said the weekend’s code yellow showed the hospital’s emergency response systems were infallible.
“We might need to call another code yellow, or another disaster response, or a mass casualty event may occur, and it just shows that our plans work,” she said.
Queensland Ambulance Services Assistant Commissioner Michelle Baxter said no extra paramedic crews were needed during the weekend.
“We worked with the emergency department to help with discharging patients and transferring them, and making sure we didn’t spend too much time getting patients into ED,” she said.
But Assistant Commissioner Baxter said it was essential for the general public to use the emergency department as a last resort.
“In flu season the advice is to take care of the flu at home, see your GP, and if your symptoms need emergency care call an ambulance. We need people to take this message home,” she said.