Dietary advice for diabetes not being received in Wales

The charity Diabetes UK Cymru has warned that dietary advice about how to deal with diabetes is only being received by 2 per cent of new patients in Wales.
The charity says that few of the estimated 7,000 new cases of diabetes being diagnosed in Wales each year are getting proper guidance on their diet, and that the Welsh NHS was possibly the worst in the UK for informing patients about the condition and its potential complications.
With a recent report suggesting that four fifths of the total budget of the NHS in the UK was being spent on treating these complications, Dai Williams, director of the Diabetes UK Cymru, commented “It’s the biggest threat we’ve got to the NHS. These kind of costs are totally unsustainable.”
He added “What it needs to do is make the public aware of the scale of the problem, that diabetes is indeed dangerous. It did it for swine flu – swine flu didn’t happen luckily – it can do it for diabetes, which is with us at the moment.”
The charity has called for guidelines produced by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) to be properly implemented for new diabetes patients so that they receive structured diabetes education. However, a spokesperson for the Welsh government said that there will be further highlighting of effective self-care in the NHS’s National Diabetes Delivery Plan over the next few years.