Diabetes ‘Question Time’

C3 event focuses on the future of diabetes in the UK

On Tuesday 17 January, C3 Collaborating for Health, Diabetes UK and SilverStar co-hosted a Question Time-style event in Westminster Central Hall, in front of an invited audience of around 150 people. The event was funded by Novo Nordisk. The panel was made up of Grace Vanterpool (a specialist diabetes nurse), three members of parliament – Stephen Dorrell, Keith Vaz and Adrian Sanders – the chief executive of Diabetes UK Baroness Barbara Young, and Viggo Birch, vice-president of Novo Nordisk Europe. It was facilitated by Stephen Dixon of Sky News, and closed with a short presentation from Paul Burstow, minister of state for care services.

The audience was made up of health professionals, policy-makers and others – and both panel and audience included people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The event was covered on Twitter (#diabetesqt).

Questions at the event included:

• Will commissioning lead to fragmented care?
• Will the Outcomes Framework work as a catalyst to help people with diabetes or not?
• How can prevention methods be improved?
• How best to care for children with diabetes
• How to encourage sharing of best practice
• The problem of limited access to pumps

The audience were actively involved throughout the event. First, all those attending were asked to take part in two votes during the event:

• Will people be more involved in their care in the new system envisaged by the new Bill? (which saw a small majority who felt that people will be more involved)
• Will diabetes care have improved by 2025? (which also saw a ‘yes’ majority).

On arrival, the audience were all invited to participate in a short poll to ascertain views on what should be the top three priorities for the NHS in diabetes, and the results were illustrative of the need to ensure that people with the disease should be closely consulted:

• Among people with diabetes, supporting self-management was seen as the highest priority (40%), followed by identification and prevention (23%), education (23%), and specialist nursing (10%).
• Among those without diabetes, the priorities were different: identification and prevention (43%), reducing variations in access to care and services (23%), and supporting self management (19%).
• Averaged across the audience as a whole, the top three priorities were identification and prevention (37.5%), supporting self-management (25%), and reducing variations in access to care and services (17%).

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