The diabetes clinic at Mayday Hospital is set to feature on the Channel 4 series The Hospital, tonight.

In the episode, doctors struggle to convince young people of the dangers of the disease.

One in five patients being treated at the hospital has diabetes which is estimated to cost the NHS £1million every hour.

Dr Richard Savine, who appears on the programme, said: “There are 15,000 to16,000 diabetics in Croydon, which is an awful lot of people. I rarely think about it in those terms though, I’d probably go mad if I started thinking about the size of the problem.”

Due to a poor diet and a lack of exercise, type 2 diabetes is being picked up in younger patients, with a new diabetic being diagnosed every three minutes in the UK.

Dr Savine said: “A great many young patients will stick their heads in the sand like an ostrich and hope it all goes away. The one thing you can guarantee with diabetes is that it’s going to come back and bite you hard.”

One patient Dr Savine treats is 17-year-old Yasmin who is overweight and not following her diet and the treatment for type 2. After a serious scare with an abscess, she says in the programme: “It was really hard to deal with the fact that I had put myself in that position.”

Twenty-five year old diabetic, Tracey’s real wake up call only came when, after falling pregnant against medical advice, she had to give birth prematurely.

The episode featuring Mayday, now known as Croydon University Hospital, is due to be screened on Channel 4 at 9pm.