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Birmingham/Solihull CCG

Response from Medicines Management

You are perfectly correct that the national intent is of no great surprise and I am sure that you aware that we have advanced plans to release our policy statements on both Flash and Continuous Glucose Monitoring.  We have always aimed to release them in advance of April and they are largely there bar final sign off from our providers, which we do not anticipate to be a major problem.

The guidance issued last week by NHSE has introduced some delay into the process as we now need to update both of our policies to reflect the revised cohort of eligible patients – they are actually a bit different from the original RMOC criteria and are certainly wider.  I am sure you will agree that it would be improper to release guidance based on the RMOC criteria when these have been superseded with what we should probably term NHSE criteria.

As I am sure you are aware, although we have not formally released our guidance, our providers have been working to the documents and have started to make Flash Glucose Monitoring FlashGM available to patients under the RMOC criteria, which I am sure that Dr Narendran will confirm for you.  Up until now, we have classified FlashGM as ‘red’ meaning that the supply is done directly from the provider rather than by GP prescription, and so our national prescribing data will not reflect the true picture.  Going forward, it is highly likely that our initial assessment and initiation of FlashGM will be done in secondary care and prescribing transferred to primary care in four to six weeks after an interim assessment that the intervention is being used as per the guideline.  At this stage, I have no concerns about us meeting the April deadline for making FlashGM available.

To me, this is fascinating as they've seen that Red Listing is probably not the best way.  Up until this point, I'd always assumed BSol would red list.


The final policy is here.

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