Worth reading the entire document though. Statements such as this, plus the studies used to provide the data in the references paint a very poor picture of type 2 care in the UK. The biggest issue being that there are 2.7mn people with type 2 and 135,000 of them on the forum. (Lets say) If there are 135,000 people benefitting from learning
how to use BG monitoring to improve their Hba1C results, this is only 5%.
The statement I have underlined in the below really bugs me though, and raises a lot of questions (based on what we know of general practice around T2s) about the triage care and approach of the GP surgeries to T2 diabetics.
For the majority of patients with type 2 diabetes who are not treated with insulin, the evidence does not support the use of routine SMBG, and trials have established no clinically meaningful improvement in either glycaemic control or hypoglycaemia.4 In addition, although SMBG confers no additional benefit to most people with type 2 diabetes not treated with insulin, it is associated with significant harms, including poorer quality of life, as well as increased depression and anxiety.5–9 Patients report that use of SMBG can be associated with feelings of blame or failure, and disappointment when clinicians are disinterested in readings.10,11 Technology appraisals have highlighted inconsistent analytical performance, large variations in type and quality of meter, and considerable confusion among both patients and professionals about the quality and interpretation of results.12 In addition, routine use of SMBG has not been shown to be cost effective.13,14
The premise of the study seems to be that HCPs are so dismissive of the benefits of SMBG for T2 diabetics that we might as well save ourselves a load of moey by not prescribing. When we did a study based on the evidence that SMBG doesn't improve BG levels, by removing the prescriptions for loads of people, we did indeed find this to be the case.
The study should have looked at how better education of T2 diabetics leads to improvements in BG/Hba1C with the use of SMBG through better education of HCPs. There is a reason why the above issues are reported and this really is a topic that Diabetes UK should be doing a lot more about.
