Diabetes: Children
(asked on 20th November 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to tackle diabetes experienced by children to help ensure they live long lives.
Preventing diabetes and promoting the best possible care for people with diabetes is a priority for this Government. NHS England is developing a diabetes management and care programme aimed at reducing variation and improving outcomes for people with diabetes. An additional £44 million Transformation Funding is being made available to support the delivery of the programme which will focus on four areas: reducing variation in the achievement of the three National Institute for Health and Care Excellence treatment targets, improving take up of structured education, improving access to multi-disciplinary foot care teams for people with diabetic foot disease and improving access to specialist inpatient support.
95% of children with diabetes have type 1 diabetes and there have been year-on-year improvements in care process delivery and in HbA1c reduction for this group. Further information is available in the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit at the following link:
For children with type 2 diabetes, the Government is committed to halving childhood obesity by 2030, which was recently reiterated in the document ‘Prevention is better than cure’ published on 5 November. The upcoming National Health Service long-term plan will have prevention at its core and build on existing work to keep people healthy and well. Chapter 2 of the Government’s Childhood Obesity Plan also aims to tackle childhood obesity and outlines the actions the Government will take towards its goal of halving childhood obesity and reducing the gap in obesity between children from the most and least deprived areas by 2030.