USF Diabetes Center turns 5, offering a world-class approach to caring for kids and adults with type 1 and type 2 diabetes
The USF Diabetes Center offers the best in patient care and education and better ways to understand and treat diabetes through cutting-edge research.
By Dave Scheiber, USF Foundation
Dr. Henry Rodriguez is on the move through a modern USF medical center that, for the past five years, has replaced uncertainty and fear with clarity and hope.
You can easily spot him – not just from his trademark bowtie, but also from calming voice and friendly smile as he interacts with fellow staff members or patients and parents.
The open layout of the center, for which Rodriguez serves as clinical director, is an impressive one – with a large classroom for teaching sessions with families, a fully operational kitchen where noted chefs demonstrate healthy cooking options, a playroom stocked with toys and games for youngsters and large examination rooms equipped with at-screen TVs to help kids relax rather than worry.
But even more impressive than the clinic’s floor plan is the life plan it offers.
This is the state-of-the-art USF Diabetes Center, which celebrates on Monday, Nov. 14 – fittingly World Diabetes Day in the midst of National Diabetes Month – its fifth year as a national leader on the Type 1 diabetes front.
The center is the brainchild of USF’s Jeffrey Krischer, PhD, the world’s No. 1 diabetes researcher, who serves as the director both the USF Diabetes Center and USF Health Informatics Institute. And it became a reality with the philanthropic help of nine Founding Families and nearly 400 individual donors.
USF’s Jeffrey Krischer, PhD, the world’s No. 1 NIH-funded diabetes researcher, serves as director of both the USF Diabetes Center and USF Health Informatics Institute.
“We offer the best in patient care and education,” says Krischer, “and better ways to understand and treat diabetes through our cutting-edge research.”
The facility also treats children and adults with Type 2 diabetes, which can sometimes be reversed with the right treatment plan. But in spite of steady progress, there remains no cure for Type 1 diabetes, a condition in which the body’s pancreas stops producing insulin. Without treatment, it results in high blood sugar, leading to a potential myriad of health problems with dire consequences.
