Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps the National Clinical Director for Obesity and Diabetes in England has taken to promote local awareness of diabetes.

Details on how the priorities outlined in the NHS Five Year Forward View will be taken forward are currently being worked up by the NHS national bodies, with engagement from a wide range of stakeholders, including the National Clinical Director (NCD) for Obesity and Diabetes (Professor Jonathan Valabhji).

This will include planning for how the National Health Service will support Public Health England in implementing their new strategy ‘From Evidence into Action: opportunities to protect and improve the nation’s health’, which includes priorities for tackling obesity, as well as the other new approaches to improving health and wellbeing as outlined in the Forward View. These include supporting healthier behaviours and the development of a national evidence-based diabetes prevention programme.

The NCD for Obesity and Diabetes provides national leadership on all aspects of diabetes care. For example, he works with the Cardiovascular Disease Strategic Clinical Networks to drive diabetes service improvement locally and nationally, using data from the National Diabetes Audit and the National Cardiovascular Intelligence Network to facilitate change.

The NCD for Obesity and Diabetes also contributed to the development of Healthier Lives: Diabetes, Hypertension and NHS Health Check. This is a major new online tool which includes information on prevalence of the conditions and their complications, levels of care provided and the quality of care achieved in each area by local authority, clinical commissioning group and general practice, compared to the England average. This has been designed to help local areas improve their services.