Common themes

The Rowan Hillson Insulin Safety Award The meeting started on Thursday evening with the inaugural Rowan Hillson insulin safety award for the best insulin prescription chart, presented by Dr Hillson herself (Figure 1). This award was clearly a challenging one to judge. There were 41 entries in total, all showing substantial individual merit. The judges were kind enough to offer an insight into the challenges and their decision making in a poster presented at the meeting the following day. The winning entry was from Dr Jenny Clayton and colleagues at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. Hard science Friday’s educational meeting started with Gary Thorpe reviewing the accuracy and precision standards of capillary blood glucose meters, which are actually calibrated to display plasma glucose concentrations. He outlined the factors that contribute to errors in measurement, the ISO standards meters should comply with, and what evidence to request from manufacturers in order to decide whether a meter is sufficiently accurate.