Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to address regional variation in access to continuous glucose monitoring, including in Dorset.

Integrated care boards are responsible for commissioning health services to meet the needs of their populations. In doing so they must have regard to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance, including for diabetes. The National Diabetes Audit (NDA), and the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit (NPDA) along with NHS Digital’s NDA and NPDA dashboards provide comprehensive data on care processes and outcomes and highlight variation. The dashboards help commissioners, providers, and paediatric diabetes units benchmark themselves and target improvements.

NHS Dorset has a policy in place for the provision of prescribable continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

In order to ensure that Dorset patients are being treated appropriately, use of CGM is tracked against patient eligibility criteria as set out in NICE guidance and the NHS Dorset CGM policy.