Abstract

Educational holidays provide an opportunity to assess the advice given to parents and diabetic children and provide insight into the difficulties that they face in everyday life. We describe our experience of camping with 43 diabetic children for two weeks. Hypoglycaemia was common but severe nocturnal episodes may be avoided by assessing the blood glucose in the evening and providing extra carbohydrate if the glucose value is less than 4.5 mmol/l at that time. Children describe hypoglycaemic symptoms which may differ from those described in standard textbooks and are predominantly neuroglycopaenic. It was impossible to improve diabetic control using only twice daily blood glucose monitoring. In conclusion, children should be encouraged to increase the frequency of daily blood glucose testing and parents should be provided with alternative methods of assessing diabetic control such as the results of glycosylated haemoglobin measurements.