WITH reference to your article 'Katie, 12, is seeking answers from NHS' (Echo, Monday12th March) I, too, suffer with type one diabetes and I greatly sympathise with Katie's views.
I find the response from Dorset CCG's Medicines Advisory Group lamentable. We are offered a new revolutionary technology - flash monitoring - that will improve the lives and outcomes of type one diabetes sufferers and the CCG evades the benefits and sensationalises the costs.
The new system is now available on prescription in Hampshire and many other parts of the UK including the whole of Wales, but in Dorset sufferers are being denied access to it.
Dorset CCG knows perfectly well that there will be savings when NHS bulk orders are negotiated.
The Advisory Group has over-estimated the cost of this improved technology by not taking sufficient account of the present costs of blood testing that it will replace.
Research published last month shows that flash monitoring is no costlier, and can produce a saving, when compared to the existing system.
Katie is quite right when she says that finger-prick testing is not discreet. It can also be quite painful and does not give the detailed information that enables good diabetes control.
Worse still, the Advisory Board takes no account of the medical benefits of flash monitoring and indeed is either indifferent to, or chooses to ignore both the evidence and the views of their own professional clinicians.
JOHN MARTINDALE
Barn Road, Broadstone, Poole
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