Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking with (a) the NHS, (b) community organisations and (c) health experts to help tackle inequalities in the treatment of diabetes.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for improving the health of their populations, including the planning and delivery of diabetes clinical services and addressing health inequalities. The national NHS Diabetes Programme (NDP) develops policies and provides leadership and support to ICBs to improve diabetes care and outcomes.

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