What does Diabetes UK think about the restriction of blood test strips?Diabetes UK believes people with diabetes have the right to be prescribed the number of strips they need to be able to manage their diabetes. Your requirement will be decided in agreement with your diabetes healthcare team and should take into account your own personal circumstances, lifestyle, type of diabetes medication and self-management techniques. Your access to test strips should not be affected by your ability to pay or where you live and receive your care.
The decision to restrict blood glucose testing strips can fail to consider that people with diabetes selfmanage their condition 95 per cent of the time. Self-monitoring, supported by education and training about what to do with test results, provides the information needed to make daily adjustments in order to maintain good diabetes control. Such adjustments may include altering the dose of your medication, delaying a meal, or taking exercise to counteract a high blood glucose reading, deciding when to eat to decrease the risk of hypoglycaemia (hypos) and deciding when to seek medical help. Testing enables people with diabetes to
self-manage their condition and to track, and take action on, blood glucose patterns over a period of time.
This supports self-management, thereby reducing the risk of complications over time (Diabetes Control and Complications Trial, 1993; UK Prospective Diabetes Study, 1998).
Research looked at by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) (2008) added further evidence ‘to the view that self-monitoring of blood glucose levels was an integral part of effective patient education packages and enabled effective use of many other therapies and lifestyle interventions’. Further ‘The evidence that plasma glucose monitoring could be replaced by urine glucose monitoring was found to be poor’.
