What is a Rufus Bear and why is he so important?

Here in the UK approximately 400,000 people live with Type 1 diabetes, 29,000 of these people are children and thanks to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund (JDRF) each child receives their very own KIDSAC after being diagnosed. A KIDSAC contains a variety of information leaflets and a kids’ guide to type 1 diabetes as well as Rufus Bear, the bear with type 1 diabetes who has felt patches on his test and injection sites. These KIDSAC’s are provided by the JDRF to every child for completely free and help children come to terms with what their diagnosis means to them. A Rufus Bear can be extremely important to a child after being diagnosed not only to help learn where the best paces to inject and test are but to learn how to inject and test their blood sugar levels. Firstaid4sport Director Michael Davison whose son, Max, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in February 2019 recalls how important a Rufus Bear was for his son. After being diagnosed Max would inject his Rufus Bear when he was being injected himself, to help learn how to inject insulin and test blood sugar levels correctly. Max has been living with type 1 diabetes for over a year and still cherishes his Rufus Bear as much as the day he got him. WHAT ARE THE COLOURED PATCHES ON RUFUS BEAR? Rufus Bear has multiple felt patches on his body, in different colours to indicate the importance of rotating insulin injection sites to prevent scar tissue build-up and insulin resistance. The red patches on both of his hands indicate testing your blood sugar levels using your fingertips. The green and blue patches on his arms, legs tummy and bottom are insulin injecting sites. The green areas are slow acting areas, these can be found on the arms and tummy of Rufus. The blue patches are fast acting areas, these can be found on Rufus’ legs and bottom. Understanding how and where to test and inject is extremely important as a person living with type 1 diabetes will have around 65,000 injections and measure their blood glucose around 80,000 times in their lifetime.