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Diabetes

I am coming to that almost straight away. I welcome the fact that there will be a type 1 diabetes parliamentary lobby by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in the next month or so to highlight some of the relevant issues. Population levels, targeting, and management and self-care are all critical, and I want to say a bit about what we are going to make happen. First and foremost, NHS Diabetes leads on improvements, spreads best practice, supports professionals and develops professional networks of the type that I have described. The national service framework for diabetes is reaching the end of its life, and we now need to set new ambitions and new directions towards making the further progress that the debate is highlighting the need for. That will be reflected in both the new cardiovascular strategy and the long-term conditions strategy, which the Department is working on in collaboration with many other stakeholders. We also need the system to be supported by incentives such as payment by results. That was why we rolled out new tariffs last April to recognise paediatric diabetes care as a discrete specialism, and why we will continue to develop tariffs to support best practice. The right hon. Gentleman asked about Eucreas, which is a glucose-lowering drug. It is composed of two drugs, metformin and vildagliptin, and I understand that although there may well be supply problems with the combined drug, the industry is not aware of any supply problem with the two separate tablets. I will gladly write to him about that in further detail, but that is what I have learned about that drug so far. More generally, the Department is working to address the issue of parallel exporting of UK medicines in conjunction with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the pharmaceutical supply chain, to ensure that medicine supplies are not compromised and we do not have the tragedies to which the right hon. Gentleman referred. I will write to him about the progress of that work. The right hon. Gentleman also asked about Copenhagen. I look forward to the opportunity to meet colleagues to share best practice and learn about it from others. As the right hon. Gentleman says, diabetes is a complex, lifelong, progressive condition. When it is well managed, with the right education and support, it is possible to prevent the most severe, sometimes fatal complications. We have the data to guide us and the evidence of what works, and we have the economic case. We are setting our strategy with the ambition of making even more progress. Now, we need commissioners and clinicians to act so that the best is not the exception but the norm across the national health service. Question put and agreed to.