Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she is taking steps to promote collaboration between (a) the NHS, (b) community organisations and (c) health experts to tackle diabetes health inequalities.

The NHS Diabetes Programme (NDP) develops policies and provides leadership and support to integrated care boards (ICBs), to improve diabetes care and outcomes. The NDP routinely engages with people with firsthand experience of diabetes, sector stakeholders, and health experts in order to inform policy, and seeks input from a broad range of communities to support development of projects that aim to tackle variation and inequalities.

The NDP collaborates extensively with Diabetes UK, who conducts research with people who have lived experience of diabetes on behalf of the programme, for specific projects, and participates in the programme’s decision making at a board level. The NDP has also collaborated with Diabetes UK’s Tackling Inequality Commission, which engaged with communities, community organisations, and health experts. A report was released of the findings in November 2023.

The National Health Service statement on information on health inequalities sets out a description of the powers available to relevant NHS bodies to collect, analyse, and publish information, and the views of NHS England about how those powers should be exercised. The following diabetes metrics are included: the care process delivery, measuring variation between the percentage of people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes receiving all eight care processes, reported by deprivation and ethnicity; and the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme, measuring variation between the percentage of NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme referrals from the most deprived quintile and the percentage of the type 2 diabetic population from the most deprived quintile.

ICBs and other NHS bodies will be required to include in their annual reports for 2023/24 and 2024/25, information that shows they have exercised their functions in accordance with the NHS legal statement. They will also need to publish reports on the information collected, how the data has been used to guide action, and summarise the inequalities it reveals.

The NDP ensures local health care systems, including those with rural communities, can benchmark and identify inequalities in diabetes care and outcomes through National Diabetes Audit data that contains demographic information such as age, deprivation, and ethnicity. Examples of the data can be found in the National Diabetes Audit Dashboards. The NDP also allocates funding to support the costs of diabetes clinical lead posts in local health systems, with a key priority of supporting improvement in addressing health inequalities at the local level.