Opposition grows against cuts to diabetes funding

Diabetes Manawatu is gathering up a contingent of protesters to hit back at MidCentral District Health Board plans to cut more than $100,000 from the Diabetes Lifestyle Centre.

Under the proposed cuts, a nurse and full-time administrator will be cut from the service, with critics saying the planned cost savings would only lead to future costs that would cripple the health system in treating the complications of diabetes.

The board set up a review of the centre earlier this year in a bid to find some of the nearly $10 million in savings that Health Minister Tony Ryall directed should be made.

Originally, the board had proposed to cut a more brutal $500,000 from the centre but scaled it back to $100,000.

The proposal for the cuts will be put before the board's hospital advisory committee on Tuesday and Diabetes Manawatu secretary Kathy Scott said she wanted to be heard at that meeting.

"We need to let them know how seriously we take this," she said.

Any cuts, she said, were unacceptable.

The board's review of the centre has focused on finding and eradicating duplication of services, but Mrs Scott said there was no duplication. The specialist Diabetes Lifestyle Centre provided care to people with Type 1 diabetes who had the most complex conditions to manage, including children and young people and pregnant women. It dealt with around one in four of the district's estimated 8000 people with diabetes.

The incidence of Type 1 diabetes was increasing by 5 per cent a year, so the board's investment in treating those people early should also be increasing, not being cut back.

Projections from 2001 were that the health system would be spending $1 billion a year by 2021 treating the complications of diabetes – such as blindness, kidney failure, amputations and cardiovascular disease – unless more was done to manage diabetes better and to keep people with diabetes out of hospital.

"They just don't seem to understand what the health needs really are, or that once the damage from diabetes is started, it escalates."

More than 70 people have written to the board or made submissions, all of them opposing the cuts.

- © Fairfax NZ News