The Scottish Government

« Previous | Contents | Next »

Listen

SCOTTISH DIABETES SURVEY 2002

Executive Summary

• This report presents the results of the 2002 Scottish Diabetes Survey. This survey provides important information on progress towards our goal of improving diabetes care across all of Scotland.

• Care of people with diabetes spans the primary and secondary care health care sectors. It is therefore an exemplar of a disease where multi-disciplinary, integrated care is essential.

• There is evidence from large randomised controlled trials in Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes that good diabetes treatment (e.g. control of blood pressure, glycaemic control and cholesterol) reduces the risk of complications.

• Considerable effort has been devoted to developing the infrastructure necessary to deliver high quality diabetes care in Scotland. Key planks of this work include the Scottish Diabetes Framework, clinical standards for diabetes published by NHS Quality Improvement Scotland, clinical guidelines published by SIGN, the Scottish Diabetes Core Dataset, and the work of SCI-DC to implement a national diabetes IM&T solution.

• In this Scottish Diabetes Survey 2002 we report:

  • 14 of 15 NHS Boards submitted data for the Survey.

  • There are 103,835 patients with known diabetes in Scotland recorded on local diabetes registers. This represents 2.03% of the population.

  • Registered prevalence ranged from 0.46% to 3.53% over health board areas. The explanation for this variance is that many NHS Boards do not as yet have comprehensive diabetes registers that cover their whole population. A number of areas have embarked on a major process of validating register data; these exercises were incomplete by the 2002 Survey submission deadline. It is anticipated that the widespread introduction and use of the SCI-DC Network system will enable the development of comprehensive registers.

  • 84% of records were associated with use of the Postcode, and Community Health Index Number (CHI) was recorded in over 90% of records in eleven areas.

  • There appears to be an excess of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes in males. The reasons for this need to be explored but could include excess cardiovascular risk in females with diabetes.

  • 81% of patients had an HbA1c test recorded.

  • 60% of patients had a record of eye screening recorded on the register in the preceding 15 months and a further 14% were screened greater than 15 months ago. This is a significant increase compared to the provisional survey of 2001.

  • Prevalence of blindness was 1% and recorded renal failure 0.5%.

  • 8,374 registered patients (NHS Board range 4.5-9.9%) have suffered a previous myocardial infarction and 3,848 (0.6-7.2%) have undergone revascularisation.

• The results of this Survey demonstrate the enormous amount of work being undertaken to provide diabetes care in Scotland. There is clear evidence of positive developments in diabetes care occurring in most NHS Boards in Scotland.

• As with the 2001 Survey, the 2002 Survey shows an information system in transition. Comprehensive, robust data at the touch of a button is not here yet. In the interim, the reality for most services is ad hoc data collation and partial returns. Improving the quality of data and the ability to collect information easily is largely dependent on the SCI-Diabetes Collaboration, an IT system that will support integrated diabetes care in NHS Scotland. The full implementation of this system is eagerly awaited.

« Previous | Contents | Next »