Diabetes services to receive additional funding to improve care and treatment

Improving diabetes care is back on the agenda as a further £40m is to be invested into bettering NHS services.
The earmarked money, part of the NHS Transformation Fund for Diabetes, will be spent on several key areas, including an extra 94,000 structured education places, employing 185 more staff to expand multidisciplinary foot care teams and adding 96 diabetes specialist nurses working in hospitals.
The announcement, made by NHS England’s chief executive Simon Stevens at this year’s Diabetes UK Professional Conference in London, sees NHS funding into diabetes care rise to over £80m in the last two years after NHS England invested £40m into diabetes services in 2017.
Diabetes UK’s chief executive Chris Askew said: “We’d hoped to have confirmation that this funding would continue, and enable local services to continue making improvements to the care they provide, so today’s announcement is great news for people living with diabetes.
“This news means that local areas can continue building on their early progress using transformation funding to improve their services. In addition to the direct benefit to people with diabetes, improving these services will also make the NHS more sustainable in the long run.”
Mr Stevens also unveiled some data relating to the Healthier You: NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP), which was launched three years ago in a bid to tackle the rising type 2 diabetes numbers.
Figures suggest around 66,000 people have now taken part in the initiative which involves identifying people who are deemed at high risk of developing the condition and referring them to the programme.
Mr Stevens said: “The NHS is already leading the way in the battle against the obesity crisis by slashing the sale of sugary drinks and super-sized snacks in hospitals, and the results now coming out of our diabetes prevention programme are also positive. Obesity is the new smoking and the scale of our response needs to match the scale of the crisis.”