The Diabetes Inpatient National Network (DINN) has been established to rectify the neglect associated with acute diabetes care. The diabetes epidemic is not sparing hospital practice – all wards are brimming with people with known and unknown diabetes, as well as stress hyperglycaemia. In-hospital hyperglycaemia has very poor outcomes and current management is frequently sub-optimal in all clinical arenas. DINN has been founded by Drs Maggie Hammersley and David Kerr (Consultant Physician and Acute Care Diabetologist, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford; and Consultant Physician and Diabetologist at the Bournemouth Diabetes and Endocrine Centre, respectively). Together they chaired this unique and exciting conference that highlighted the inpatient diabetes crisis, reviewed the evidence, debated current perceived wisdom and planned for the future. It is the view of DINN that the in-hospital care of people with diabetes or hyperglycaemia must be the thrust of specialist diabetes services from this moment onwards. ...

Today’s diabetes world is fast moving and exciting; knowledge is accumulating at an astonishing rate. To help understand the present, however, it sometimes helps to examine the past. In this installment of Tattersall’s Tales, Robert Tattersall describes the history of oral hypoglycaemic agents, beginning with nostrums like ‘Dill’s Diabetic Mixture’ in the early 1900s, to the development of the synthalins with fatal side-effects....