Anna Clarke, health promotion and research manager with the Diabetes Federation of Ireland, says the variety of her job makes it challenging.
The federation aims to support all people affected by diabetes in Ireland. I was a diabetes nurse specialist, then I came in here to set up the helpline and the website and found it is an area where you can advocate very strongly for people with diabetes.
My role is to raise awareness of diabetes, its symptoms, the risk factors for diabetes and the management of it in the community.
I am based in the office but I travel quite a bit. This morning I came in and checked e-mails and that would involve dealing with questions coming in from the website, other queries about research and also the day-to-day administration e-mails.
After that I did an interview for a radio station and then I started organising an educational meeting for next month. I'm also preparing literature for a talk I'm giving tomorrow.
Diabetes is a major concern at the moment. It is a future epidemic, and some would say it's a current epidemic. We would say there are about 150,000 people with diagnosed diabetes in Ireland and another 200,000 with pre-diabetes or undiagnosed diabetes.
People will come to us to talk about health and the risk factors. And the media will always come to us when there's any type of story about diabetes in the papers.
We would get calls into the helpline and any that are of a medical nature would be referred back to their own medical team, but if they feel they want to talk to a nurse I am here to take that call as well, so I draw on my nursing background.
I also run pharmacy clinics where I screen people that are at risk for diabetes. We don't diagnose anyone, all we may do is find a result that would warrant further investigation, in which case we refer them on to their GP.
I also see people who have diabetes who want to ask me questions that they don't specifically want to ask their own healthcare team. And we are starting off a big research study with Beaumont and Temple Street.
The most rewarding aspect is getting better services for people with diabetes and that's a big part of my role, getting advocacy for people with diabetes.
At the same time I am doing a PhD on the health beliefs and self-management behaviours of people newly diagnosed with type II diabetes.
People with diabetes don't get their voice at high enough levels so I am doing this from a patient perspective. I do that some evenings and there are some study days.
There's a load of variety, the day is constantly changing and it really is a matter of whatever is most pressing at the moment is what I end up dealing with.
For information on diabetes, log on to www.diabetes.ie