I understand what you mean, but I also feel that it's highly beneficial for all diabetics especially to chart patterns and gain better control and understanding and patterns relating to our T1. I buy my own and at £100 a month it's expensive. I do not need a prescription of testing strips (which for someone who used 8-10 a day is massive saving) nor do I need a prescription for lancets, which would equate to one sensor at least if not two. I now test my sugars up to 20 times a day as it's so simple. My Hba1c has come down by 1.5. I see that a short term spend will equal a long term saving for the NHS. I feel really strongly about this as do my hospital diabetes team
I've posted this regularly on topics discussing the Libre, and I'm going to do it here again too. Whilst the Libre and CGM are amazing tools, and help people to improve their management, the people who pop up and say "I test 8-10 times a day so it will save the NHS tons of money in strips" are rather missing the point. You are the absolute minority. Most people with Type 1 test less than once a day (if you dig around the forum and my blog I've linked to the studies on multiple occasions, but it amounts to about 50% of all T1s, which is a shocking statistic) and in addition, the cost of CGM/Libre is considerably more than Glucomen LX test strips over a year - roughly twice the cost in fact - (check this post
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/thr...gn-the-petition-now.96988/page-2#post-1093151).
Then let's look at the other factor. People. Most users don't know how to interpret CGM or Libre data and will need a lot of help from already stretched clinic staff. Many of whom also need educating. And then there's the 30% of the T1s who the NHS themselves have identified as really struggling. So before we give tech to everyone, let's get all the T1s educated properly with regular, systematic refreshers, and then, once they have a handle on how to manage Diabetes, give them expensive tech, at least until the price comes down.
And don't forget that amongst all the data that has been published on Libre and CGM, there are two very different views. Amongst those who do receive CGM on the NHS for free, there is a much higher rate of failure to use and alarm fatigue than amongst those who purchase it themselves. In addition, in a fairly large survey of CGM and Libre users
here, the Libre turned out to reduce the severity and frequency of hypos the least out of all the CGM systems listed (and bear in mind this is mostly people self-funding the systems), so it's not a good argument for that technology specifically.
So while these technologies are a great tool, they need to be looked at more widely, and it's the education of users that will be the critical factor in achieving long term benefits. Just taking a look back at UK T1 data, the number of people with an Hba1C value lower than 7.5% (68 mmol/mol) in the UK hasn't changed much between 2003 & 2016 (using NDA data), and yet there is more education and more technology available to help with this.
As an anecdotal aside, I've participated in focus groups of T1s from across the spectrum of the population, and normally I'm the only one with CGM, and out of the a groups of typically 12-15, only one or two others are interested in it. Unfortunately it's not the panacea we like to think it is.
While tools help, education helps more and costs less, and once the majority are educated, then the tools really start to make a difference. So for me it's education first, tools second.