Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to increase the number of people living with diabetes who receive their NICE recommended care processes.

Recovery of routine diabetes care following the pandemic is a key priority for the NHS England Diabetes Programme. Transformation funding between 2020/21 and 2022/23 has supported recovery, as such that rates of routine care delivery are now almost back to the pre-pandemic level. Services in the National Health Service are asked to continue this upward trajectory, with a particular focus on ensuring that people from socio-economically deprived areas receive their annual reviews.

According to the report from the fourth quarter of 2022/23, the percentage of people who received all eight National Institute of Health and Care Excellence recommended care processes in England between January 2022 and March 2023 was 40.5% for type 1 diabetes and 57.8% for type 2/other diabetes, 15.3% and 20.6% higher respectively than the same period in the previous year. The percentages remained slightly lower than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, where in the fourth quarter of 2019/20, they were 42.3% and 58.5%, respectively.