Diabetes: Artificial Pancreas

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Howarth]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I am aware of the #WeAreNotWaiting group and as recently as earlier today I had an email from one of them. I will not name them, because I do not have permission to do so.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Howarth]

I will give way in a moment. I just want to finish answering the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe).

The email reads:

“As someone who has built an artificial pancreas using the open artificial pancreas system and is reaping the rewards from this technology, I just wanted to wish you good luck with this evening’s Adjournment debate. Having been a type 1 for 38 years, I can confirm that this is truly life-changing.”

Before I give way to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), I want to say a word about those who are manufacturing their own artificial pancreases. In some respects, we should celebrate that there are so many young people out there who have the ability to build what is in effect an artificial pancreas, while, at the same time, writing their own algorithms to link them together. That is truly amazing.

I have a background—this is a long time ago—in engineering and I cannot even conceive of doing that, so it is very encouraging that people are doing it. On the other hand, I worry. I have spoken to clinicians and one said to me, “I’ve looked at some of them and they are viable devices, but I worry about people building something that is not reliable and then relying upon it. There could be serious consequences down the line.” But this does show what is possible when people—in their bedrooms or in their mum and dad’s garage—are effectively able to control their own diabetes.

[Jim Shannon]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing this debate on using modern technology to deal with diabetes. I declare an interest as a type 2 diabetic. I know other Members in the Chamber have similar ailments.

Northern Ireland has some of the highest levels of diabetes in the whole of the United Kingdom. We have the highest level of type 1 diabetics among children in the whole of the United Kingdom per head of population. That gives an idea of the importance of this debate.

I am very interested in the success of the artificial pancreas given to a teenager in Leeds. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that this revolutionises both treatment and quality of life, but that it must be available throughout the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? It must not be a postcode lottery. This must be available as a matter of course for those who fit the protocol. Will the Minister tell us how we can do that across the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain—Scotland, Wales, England—and Northern Ireland?

[Mr Howarth]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who must be psychic, because that is the very next point I was going to make.

There have been, as the hon. Gentleman says, postcode lottery-style problems with accessing the technology. For example, with FreeStyle Libre, a flash glucose monitoring device, patients in Liverpool are able to get it on prescription if they meet the criteria. That is very welcome, but many patients from outside the area cannot get one, as up to 30% of CCGs do not fund them. There needs to be more work done on that and I know the Government have made an announcement, which I will refer to in a moment.

Thanks to Diabetes UK’s campaign on 14 November, World Diabetes Day, NHS England announced that from April 2019 the FreeStyle Libre will be made available to all who meet the clinical criteria regardless of where they live. That is a very welcome development. I do not think it will apply to Northern Ireland, but I hope a similar policy is adopted in Northern Ireland. Innovation in diabetes technology is evolving rapidly in exciting ways.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Howarth]

The right hon. Gentleman is right, and it was an omission on my part not to have acknowledged that. Any parent of a diabetic child has to experience the disease—at second hand, but in very important ways. The younger the child, the more responsibility parents have to take, so that is important. By the way, training and other support for parents needs to be built into the system.

[Jim Shannon]

I just want to reinforce what we do for diabetics in Northern Ireland. The surgery that I belong to, in Cuan in Kircubbin, holds diabetic classes twice a year. The staff there do tests on all the diabetics—type 1 and type 2—including for their blood pressure, feet, eyes and all the other things they need to test in the clinics. The surgery then reports back on those tests. For instance, patients will get an eyesight test a month after they have been to the clinic. That shows that there are ways of dealing with this. I am not sure whether surgeries on the United Kingdom mainland do something just as good, but perhaps they should.

[Mr Howarth]

There are centres where people can access a lot of services in one place in a similar way to what the hon. Gentleman describes as happening in Northern Ireland.

I attended an interesting conference in Vancouver three or four years ago. I found out—the Minister or one of her colleagues might want to investigate this a bit further—that some of the smaller island states tend to provide all the services in one place because they do not have the capacity or resources to do anything else. It is an accident of geography that they are forced to do that, but it seems to work very well, particularly in some of the Pacific island areas, where there is a massive problem with type 2 diabetes.