Emma Laird, 15, finished her GCSE exams last week and is in many ways a typical teenager. But by the time she learnt that she had Type 1 diabetes, three years ago, she was already in hospital.

For 15 months, Emma had the support of a specialist diabetic nurse, Libby, who helped her keep to a regime of four insulin injections and at least two blood sugar tests each day. When Libby left the health service, no one was appointed to take her place.

Emma’s mother, Jane, 46, from Cricklewood, northwest London, said that her daughter lost out, apparently because of cost-cutting by the local health services.

Emma stopped taking her injections, in part because there was no longer anyone to check up on her. “Libby would do blood tests every six to eight weeks to check my sugar levels, but hospital appointments were so far apart,” she said. “After she had gone it was easy not to keep up the tests and injections.”

The consequences soon became apparent when she fell ill on holiday in Wales. A local hospital diagnosed diabetic ketoacidosis, requiring urgent treatment.

Emma’s mother said: “It was horrible. She was howling in pain. She was rushed to an intensive care unit and stayed there for the next four days. We were told that if we had left it another half an hour the consequences could have been really serious. I feel like this would not have happened if we had not lost our specialist nurse.”

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