Skip to main content

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 I am sure you will agree that it would be improper to release guidance based on the RMOC criteria when these have been superseded with what we should probably term NHSE criteria.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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

First Post

This is my first post on a blog. Not sure whether it will be the last, but we'll see. I'm not sure I'm keen on sharing too much via a blog. I think work is out of bounds and not sure I want to share too much family stuff, but maybe I'll use it to record certain events. Most probably I will use it to record my experiences with diabetes. I was diagnosed yesterday with Type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetes. I am terrified (probably phobic, although I think it is an overused term) of needles, and know little about diabetes. Evidently my blood glucose was 37mmol/l when a normal reading is less than 10mmol/l. I guess the writing was on the wall. I have lost weight and had great thirst even though I ate lots of stuff and drank almost throughout the day. It is going to be an interesting few weeks finding out about the condition and dealing with the inevitable hardships that may follow. I even managed to eat Weetabix this morning without sugar for the first time in my life! I'...

The CCG Project!

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....

Abbott dX Virtual 2020

Having missed the preceding event in 2019 (in Lisbon) through my man meets horse moment, I was greatly looking forward to ‘attending’ this year’s event, albeit from my spare room rather than the rather more appealing Portuguese capital…but at least the quality of tea on offer was top-notch! Each year since 2015, Abbott have run an event for bloggers and influencers (and me!) bringing together representatives from all over Europe.   This year there were over forty representatives from fifteen European countries, including eight people from the UK.   The programme was split over Friday evening and Saturday morning with a variety of speakers and discussion sessions.   The sessions were run on the Remo platform ( https://remo.co/ ), an application I didn’t know of previously, but certainly something that has great potential.   I’ll go through its functionality at the end of my review. At this point I need to stress that I haven’t been asked to blog about this event a...