NHS England makes preventing type 2 diabetes a key priority

Tackling obesity and preventing new cases of type 2 diabetes is to be one of NHS England’s top commitments for 2016-17.

Ten priority areas of healthcare needs have been highlighted in NHS England’s recently published Business Plan for the coming year.

Obesity was noted as one of the main health problems that can be linked with developing type 2 diabetes, with a rise from 2.7 million cases in 2013 to an estimated 4.6 million cases in 2030. A further 5 million people are believed to be at “high risk” of developing type 2 diabetes.

Education on healthy eating and lifestyle advice will be given to people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes

The recently launched Healthier You: the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme will provide education on healthy eating and lifestyle advice to help people lose weight and encourage more exercise, all of which combined have been proven to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

People at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes will be given support to help modify their diet, control their weight and become more physically active through the prevention programme.

More than 26 million people - half of the population - will be potentially covered by the programme, with a first wave of 27 areas, and making up to 20,000 places available. This will be rolled out to the whole country by 2020 with an expected 100,000 referrals available annually in the coming years.

The NHS England Business Plan said: “We will monitor the uptake of the prevention programme to ensure it reaches groups who are often under represented such as Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities. If providers market their services, or where we introduce direct recruitment by providers, we will include performance measures to ensure they recruit a representative proportion of people from BME and similar communities with low access to services.

“We will contribute to the government’s forthcoming child obesity plan to help secure reductions in the percentage of children who are overweight or obese. We will also work to reduce the variation in the management and care of people with diabetes.”

Over the next year NHS England is also encouraging the health and care schemes to come together by region to create their own local blueprint – a Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) – based not on individual institutions but on local populations, setting out how they will address their own health, care and financial challenges.

These STPs will provide the roadmap for local areas over the next five years in spreading new care models, rolling out technology and driving clinical priorities such as diabetes prevention, learning disability, cancer and mental health.

According to the plan, NHS England’s commissioning budget for 2016-17 is £105.8 billion, which is an increase of £5.2 billion compared to the 2015-16 budget.