ProfessorJane Speight

Jane's research interests focus broadly on understanding and reducing the psychosocial burden of living with and self-managing diabetes, and optimising diabetes education, support and self-care to improve both health and quality of life.

Jane brings behavioural insights, methods and analysis to enhance the effective implementation of new treatments / technologies and models of care. She has expertise in the development, use and interpretation of measures of psychological processes and outcomes in diabetes, also known as patient- or person-reported outcomes (PROs).

Her research interests include:
- Diabetes-related stigma: in 2023, she co-led an international consensus to bring an end to diabetes stigma and discrimination (published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Jan 2024). The related Pledge has been taken by 4,500+ individuals and organisations in 119 countries (visit EndDiabetesStigma.org)
- Language & communicating with and about (people with) diabetes: in 2011, she led the world's first national position statement to promote 'a new language for diabetes', which was endorsed by Diabetes Australia, and has been emulated in more than 20 countries across the world. On the 10th anniversary, she led publication of a revision, 'Our language matters', in 2021. She is senior author of a 2026 review published in Diabeti Medicine.
- Psychosocial aspects of living with diabetes, including diabetes-specific distress, fear of hypoglycaemia and hyperglycaemia
- Hypoglycaemia: impaired awareness of hypoglycaemia, fear of hypoglycaemia, and preventing recurrent severe hypoglycaemia
- Behavioural change to support optimal self-management of diabetes
- Experience and impact of diabetes, treatments & technologies from the individual’s perspective (i.e., on person-reported outcomes)
- Structured diabetes education and psycho-education: developing, evaluating and enhancing provision
- Investigating the unmet needs of specific populations, e.g. young adults with type 2 diabetes, adolescents with type 1 diabetes, women with diabetes planning and during pregnancy. 

Jane is widely regarded as an authority on the development, use and interpretation of measures of psychosocial processes and outcomes in diabetes, also known as person-reported outcome measures (PROMs) or person-reported experience measures (PREMs). She provides expertise on the use of PROMs and PREMs in clinical practice and in clinical trials.

Projects

Jane has been an investigator on numerous large, multidisciplinary studies, many of which involve multiple sites/centres and/or international collaborations. These include:
* Australian Hybrid Closed Loop (funding: JDRF)
* CLEAR (Closed Loop and Education for hypoglycaemia Awareness Restoration) (US NIH)
* DAFNE (Diabetes UK)

* DAFNEplus (UK NIHR)
* GooD4Mum (NHMRC)
* GP-OSMOTIC (NHMRC)
* HypoCOMPaSS (Diabetes UK)
* HypoPAST (MRFF TTRA)
* HypoRESOLVE program (EU-IMI2)
* LISTEN (MRFF TTRA)
* My Diabetes Coach (NHMRC)
* MaGDA-2 (NHMRC)
* ME-MaGDA (AGDoH)
* OPEN Diabetes (EU Horizon 2020)

* PREDICT (NHMRC)
* "Is insulin right for me?" (Sanofi)
* "Who's looking after your eyes?" (Vision 2020).