Dr Dessi Zaharieva is an instructor, certified exercise physiologist and certified diabetes care and education specialist currently working in paediatric endocrinology at Stanford University. She has also been living with Type 1 diabetes for over 25 years. Her research focuses on strategies to manage blood glucose concentrations around exercise in youth and adults with type 1 diabetes. In addition, integrating continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data and wearable physical activity tracker data (e.g. heart rate, step count, energy expenditure) into remote monitoring platforms, creating a data overlay that enables health care professionals to visualise and integrate exercise discussions into diabetes consults.

The abundance of health and medical information available online and throughout social media platforms has created community members that are more informed and more proactive than ever before. When community members present to healthcare professionals armed with this knowledge and requesting specific treatments, it can be challenging for healthcare professionals to practice autonomously while also reaching an agreement with such a consumer. This plenary lecture will aim to address this powershift between healthcare professionals and community members, and provide tips on how to work together to achieve safe and superior health outcomes. Join us on Thursday 24th of August 2023 at 11AM AEST for Associate Professor Gary Kilov’s lecture entitled ‘Consumer-driven health inertia – what happens when the patient is the expert?’ Associate Professor Gary Kilov is a founding member of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) Diabetes specific interest group and the Primary Care Diabetes Society of Australia (PCDSA). He is involved in undergraduate and post graduate education within Australia and internationally, being widely published in peer reviewed journals on topics covering diabetes, obesity and respiratory medicine. When he is not immersed in the world of academia, Associate Professor Kilov shares his time with Launceston, treating patients with diabetes and obesity related conditions.