Campaign successes
With your help we have taken some major steps forward to create a world where diabetes can do no harm. By signing petitions, sharing your stories and contacting decision makers, you've helped us to accomplish great things to improve diabetes care and prevent type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes Tech Can't Wait
Building on recent expansions in access to diabetes technology – notably recommendations to offer continuous glucose monitors (CGM) for everyone with type 1 diabetes and some people with type 2 diabetes – we launched our Diabetes Tech Can’t Wait campaign in 2023 in England with a tool to enable people with diabetes to find out tech availability in their area based on local policies.
As well as providing people living with diabetes an interactive map of the technology currently available to them, the campaign invited people to share their stories, take actions to lobby their MP and engage local Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) yet to implement policies aligned with national guidelines. Our efforts, combined with those from other stakeholders, resulted in an increase in updated CGM policies in England, with seven more ICBs fully aligned with guidelines for type 1 and eight for type 2 eight months after the campaign launch. Though there is still work to do, a majority of ICBs now have aligned policies for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Towards the end of 2023, at the cusp of the publication of new national guidance on access hybrid closed-loop technology in England, we also engaged our campaigner base to lobby decision-makers and make a call to ensure funding was made available to support a rollout. As part of this, we mobilised over 2000 supporters to write to the Minister for Health to make a call for government support to roll out Hybrid Closed Loop.
We were delighted to hear that, as part of a five year plan to offer this life-changing technology to a majority of people with type 1 diabetes in England, NHS England will provide ring-fenced reimbursement funding which will be instrumental in supporting local systems to realise this ambition.
In Scotland, the Diabetes Tech Can’t Wait campaign secured a great win with the Scottish Government announcing £8.8 million in new funding available for diabetes technology that will ensure that all children and more adults living with type 1 diabetes in Scotland will have access to hybrid closed loop technology. This was a result of concerted pressure put on health decision-makers to ensure this was considered a priority for funding. We were joined in the campaign by thousands of supporters working alongside the Tech Collective, a community of people passionate about access to diabetes technology.
Diabetes is Serious
The Diabetes is Serious campaign was launched after the height of the coronavirus pandemic, aiming to put diabetes care on the political agenda as the NHS began to recover. Together we campaigned for greater focus on diabetes care, and secured a requirement for local health systems to publish plans for how they would restore diagnosis, monitoring and management of diabetes, to pre-pandemic levels. This was followed by further guidance from the Royal College of GPs and NHS England on recovering diabetes services in June 2022. Since then, we have seen a gradual increase in the number of people receiving all 8 of their essential health checks, and we continue to campaign to make sure that nobody misses out. Join the campaign.
Diabetes and Driving
Together we successfully campaigned for changes to be made to Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and Driver and Vehicle Agency (DVA) guidelines. In 2018, the law finally changed and people who have episodes of severe hypoglycaemia only when they are asleep no longer risk losing their driving licence. In 2019, we successfully campaigned for new guidance that allowed people with diabetes to check their glucose (sugar) levels using flash glucose monitoring and continuous glucose monitoring. Read more here.
