Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the paper by Julian Guest et al Cohort study evaluating the burden of wounds to the UK’s NHS in 2017/18: update from 2012/13, published in the British Medical Journal on 22 December 2020, what steps they are taking in response to the finding that (1) the percentage of adults with a wound who were less than 65 years of age increased from 35 per cent in 2012/2013 to 67 per cent in 2017/2018, and (2) the percentage increase in people with diabetes in the same period.

An increase in wounds in younger patients is likely to be related to an increase in the prevalence of co-morbidities in a younger population, as chronic wounds are usually due to co-morbidities that affect wound healing, such as patients with diabetes, arterial disease and venous disease.

NHS England and NHS Improvement fund the National Wound Care Strategy Programme which is developing a number of quality improvement initiatives to prevent wounds and improve wound healing. NHS England and NHS Improvement also continue to prioritise diabetes prevention, including through The NHS Long Term Plan, which commits to fund a doubling of the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme over the next five years, including a new digital option to widen patient choice and target inequality. Preventing diabetes and other co-morbidities is key to reducing the prevalence of wounds in adults.