If you want to know why the great Labour-NHS argument about healthcare is wrong, read today’s National Audit Office report on the provision of diabetes care in England. Diabetes is one of this country’s biggest health problems and it is getting worse. There are currently over three million people with diabetes here today, and, on some estimates, by 2020 there will be nearly four. In the last 15 years the number of people with the condition in England has more than doubled.
Yet according to the NAO, the treatment they receive from the NHS is little short of shocking. There are nine main standards for proper diabetes care, laid down by the Department of Health in 2001, and, say the NAO, there isn’t a single primary care trust in the country that comes close to meeting all of them. If you take the key standards whose achievement is necessary to minimise the risk of people with diabetes developing complications from their condition — complications that can lead to blindness, amputation or even death — less than one person in five is being treated properly.
Whose fault is this? Well, for a start, I doubt whether the diabetes ‘czar’, an innocuous diabetologist called Rowan Hillson, who was given the grand title of National Diabetes Director under Labour, will resign as a result of today’s report, or that anyone would much notice if she did.
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