We welcome the announcement on Wednesday by Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, that £2.2 billion of new funding will go towards addressing health inequalities in deprived and coastal areas.
In our recently published 10-year vision for how diabetes care needs to be improved in England we called on the government to reform the funding of primary care to tackle health inequalities so that more people living with diabetes get a good standard of care.
Diabetes disproportionately affects our most deprived communities. Those in the poorest areas are twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes compared to those in the most affluent areas, and for children the risk is five times higher.
In deprived areas, people with all types of diabetes also experience significantly worse long-term health outcomes and worse standards of care.
Despite socioeconomic deprivation being a known cause of poor health in England, the NHS has struggled to sufficiently improve services in deprived areas. One of the reasons for this is the way primary care (GPs) is currently funded under a mechanism known as the Carr-Hill formula.
We were pleased to see the Secretary of State announce that the funding mechanism will be reviewed to take into account socio-economic deprivation. We have been calling for this review to happen and will be following the next steps closely.
The government has committed to halving the gap in healthy life expectancy amongst the richest and poorest areas of the country, and this is an important and welcome step towards achieving this goal.
We hope that the government’s upcoming 10 Year Health Plan this month builds on this announcement to tackle inequality.
