Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the question and for his advocacy in this area. I have discussed this issue with him. Deputy Devlin is Chair of the all-party Oireachtas committee. We met with Diabetes Ireland before last year's budget. I assure the Deputy that this is a matter of great priority for the Government. There are various things we have done in the past few years. One is, in line with a request from Diabetes Ireland, that we are setting up the national diabetes register. We have not had one before. We began rolling out screening for gestational diabetes last year, which has been received very well.

One of the most important advances is diabetes is included in chronic disease management, CDM. We have got these CDM hubs around the country. I have met diabetes patients in my own constituency at the CDM hub in Bray and they said it has been life-changing for them to be able to get the specialist care they need in the community rather than having to go into the hospitals.

Another great advance, as the Deputy said, has been these continuous glucose-monitoring products. There is good news for those with type 1 diabetes in that there has been a significant increase in the numbers using them. In fact, there has been nearly a threefold increase in the past few years, up from 6,000 to nearly 17,000 now. It is not cheap in terms of the additional cost to the State. The €20 million in funding in 2021 has now gone up to €56 million just for type 1 diabetes. The estimated cost we have, were we to roll out the same to people with type 2 diabetes - and it is something the Deputy would like to do and Government would most certainly like to do - would be about €200 million to €400 million extra per year. To put that in context, it would be about the size of the entire additional healthcare budget for last year. At this point, we are keeping it under advisement. We want to set up the national diabetes register, and we are setting up that so we can accurately ascertain the numbers with type 2 diabetes. Then we will move from there.

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