News! News! News!
This morning the BBC reports that “The majority of NHS spending on diabetes is avoidable, says a report in the journal Diabetic Medicine. It suggests that 80% of the NHS’s £9.8bn annual UK diabetes bill goes on the cost of treating complications.”
Who’da thought that prevention of complications now through the provision of quality equipment and good care now saves cash in the future? Even I can see that and I’m a bloody dog for God’s sake!
The most unusual thing about the article is that the BBC have obvious commissioned new diabetes-filler pictures, rather than using the same picture on every article as they usually do (see discussion here: http://www.shootuporputup.co.uk/user-groups/shoot-up/forum/topic/bbc-news-24000-diabetes-deaths-a-year-could-be-avoided/). However the one of the tubby tummy half way down the page put me off my morning dog biscuit!
I was shocked to see @tim helping the BBC this morning.
They had a stock clip of a blood test being done which was revealed to be 15.9 & as we all know whenever a camera & a tester are present his blood sugar sores!
Haven’t read the article but the first two points of advice were aimed at diet control, not us insulin types.
Articles such as these really should seperate the two conditions!
The BBC website piece does, at the beginning, say:
“Both Type 1 diabetes, which tends to appear in childhood, and Type 2 diabetes, often linked to diet, lead to problems controlling the amount of sugar in the blood.”
The stats are interesting*: of the £9.8billion that is spent by the NHS on diabetes, about £1billion is on Type 1, and £8.8billion on Type 2. So approximately 10% vs 90% – which correlates nicely to the split between types amongst the diabetes population…
*I might be the only one who finds this interesting.
It’s quite interesting Joe – so you’re not entirely in a minority this time 😉
But the medications, etc, aren’t the same.
Given the costs of pens, needles, pumps, insulin, meters, test strips etc for Type 1’s it’d suggest complications more with type 2’s
Not that all type 1’s are perfect (i know I wasn’t always!) but I’d suggest generally better behaved due to complications that happen from not being well behaved.
But that to me is the issue, any of these reports have too many assumptions & should therefore stick to one disease type, preferably with a seperate analysis of pump/mdi treatments.
15.9? Ho ho ho! Sounds like one of my on-camera results – check out the infamous video in question on YouTube – certainly Alison’s & my favourite video that we did:
http://betes.co.uk/84s5d
Oh, and here’s DUK’s response to this too:
NHS spending on diabetes ‘to reach £16.9 billion by 2035’ – Diabetes UK http://betes.co.uk/2c7fp
And here’s the NHS “Behind the Headlines” story too:
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/04april/Pages/nhs-diabetes-costs-cases-rising.aspx