Julian Knight MP has joined calls for Birmingham and Solihull Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to offer up-to-date care to diabetics and end the current postcode lottery in treatment.
This month he will attend a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Diabetes to look at access to Flash Glucose Monitoring, a new technique which offers patients an easier-to-use and less painful alternative to finger-pricking.
At present Flash Glucose Monitoring is only regularly available in Northern Ireland, Wales, and fewer than half of areas in England and Scotland. Solihull CCG continues to require patients to make individual funding requests to access the sensors, rather than providing them as a matter of course.
Commenting on the news, Julian Knight said:
“Solihull residents deserve the same quality of treatment as people in other parts of the country. Several have got in touch with me looking for help accessing this new and much less painful alternative to traditional finger-pricking, and my office has written to Solihull CCG several times – yet they continue to lag behind other NHS groups.
“Our National Health Service should be national, and this postcode lottery for access to modern medicine is unacceptable. That’s why I will be joining my Parliamentary colleagues to examine the issue, and have again to the CCG to make my position clear.”