Diabetes

(asked on 13th March 2015) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will take steps to implement the recommendations of Diabetes UK's report State of the Nation (England): Challenges for 2015 and beyond, published in January 2015.


Answered by
 Portrait
Jane Ellison
This question was answered on 20th March 2015

Diabetes UK’s State of the Nation report called for good care for everyone with diabetes, and a greater focus on prevention. Over recent years, the quality of NHS services for people with diabetes has improved and, as a result, so have health and care outcomes.

NHS England has prioritised the prevention of Type 2 diabetes. It has recently launched a programme which will make England the first country to implement at scale a national Type 2 diabetes prevention programme, modelled on our own and international proven experience. It will link into the NHS Health Check programme, which helps identify people between 40 and 75 at risk of diabetes early on so that action can be taken to prevent the disease from occurring. In the last year, almost 3 million NHS Health Check offers were made and almost 1.5 million appointments were taken up.

Outcomes for people with diabetes are measured through the NHS Outcomes Framework and the Clinical Commissioning Group Outcomes Indicator Set, which are both updated and published annually. This provides clear, comparative information for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), health and wellbeing boards, local authorities, patients and the public about the quality of health services commissioned by CCGs and the associated health outcomes. Reviewing progress against these indicators forms part of NHS England's on-going assurance of CCGs.

In addition, Public Health England has produced Healthier Lives: Diabetes, an online tool with interactive heat maps demonstrating prevalence, complications, levels of care provided and the quality of care achieved for people with diabetes by local authority, clinical commissioning group and general practice. This allows local comparisons to be made against the England average as well different localities.

Action for Diabetes set out a broad vision and direction for how NHS England will support improvements in outcomes for people with and at risk of diabetes in the coming years, as a direct commissioner of services and supporting CCGs in their commissioning role. There were no recommendations specifically for CCGs to deliver.

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