The lived experience of UK students transitioning to university with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transitioning from secondary school to university is a high-risk period for managing type 1 diabetes among UK students. Canadian research identified limited systemic support during this period. However, there is a lack of qualitative insight into how students navigate this transition in the UK, where healthcare and education systems differ. This study addressed that gap through semi-structured interviews to understand what makes this transition particularly challenging and what support students would find most helpful. A purposive sample comprised seven participants aged 19–29 from four UK universities. Thematic analysis, guided by Braun and Clarke’s (2022) six-phase framework, identified three superordinate themes: management, lifestyle, and support. Participants described increased independence at university, which had mixed effects on their diabetes management. Many reported poorer blood sugar control and health complications, influenced by disrupted routines, alcohol use, and irregular eating habits. The absence of parents, friends, familiar school staff, and proactive paediatric care also contributed to difficulties. Students suggested that designated advisors and private medical spaces on campus could better support their diabetes self-care when they first start university. These findings suggest that tailored support packages from healthcare providers and education institutions are essential to help students mitigate transitional challenges. Future research should evaluate whether such initiatives improve health outcomes for this at-risk population.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".