Shortly after the previous post, I received a phonecall from the Diabetes department at the hospital. They said that I needed to be there within half an hour as they had only just seen my referral letter and were concerned for my health. When I got there, they expected me to be much worse than I was and even had admission papers ready. Luckily I appeared to be OK, although my level was still 25 mmol/l. This began what was a very traumatic afternoon, not physically but mentally. Even though (being a scientist) I understand the mechanisms of Insulin action, I knew little about the condition. The reality I was told was that I had type I diabetes, and therefore would need to inject insulin for the rest of my life. This didn't hit me immediately as my needle phobia had well and truly taken hold. However, through the excellent support of the entire team (or so it seemed) at the diabetes clinic and my wonderful wife, I was able by the end of the afternoon to self-administer the first of probably 75,000 insulin injections I would need in my lifetime.
In order to find out the situation around the country for Libre prescribing now that the national policy has been published, I have made the decision to contact many of them to find out their plans. I have arbitrarily chosen to contact all English CCGs that in December 2018 prescribed Libre via Primary Care to less than 5% of their population (and one specific request from a group member). I had hoped this would be a small list, but there are 135 CCGs on the list. I may have bitten off more than I can chew, but I'm committed to doing this and feeding back. It worked before and hopefully this level of scrutiny will bring similar results. Below is a screenshot of the base document I am sending to each of the CCGs - it has some fields that are merge fields, so don't worry about the brackets and codes in the document (I found a typo, which has now been corrected too) . The major piece of work with respect to this is finding the right person to contact....
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