… now the Department of Health and Social Care needs to fund the tools to deliver them.
On 7 July 2026, then Health Secretary James Murray launched the NHS Cardiovascular-Renal-Metabolic Modern Service Framework, committing to reduce premature deaths from heart disease and stroke by 25% over the next decade. He said: “Too many people are dying early from heart attacks and strokes that we know are preventable. That is why I am proud of our new partnership with Diabetes UK, the first of many, through which we will work closely with expert organisations to help people reduce their risk of getting ill.”
The government’s own press release explicitly named Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes:
“Cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes are closely linked, with people living with diabetes or prediabetes at significantly higher risk of heart attack and stroke.”
Health professionals and patient advocates are welcoming the acknowledgement — but warning that the framework contains a critical funding gap that will make its own ambitions impossible to deliver without urgent action.
Type 2 diabetes sits at the intersection of every arm of the CVRM framework. It is a metabolic disease. It is the leading cause of kidney failure in the UK. It multiplies cardiovascular risk dramatically: people with diabetes are nearly 2.5 times more likely to have a heart attack, twice as likely to have a stroke, and five times more likely to need kidney dialysis. Every week in the UK, diabetes leads to 184 amputations, over 1,000 strokes, 700 heart attacks and more than 3,340 cases of heart failure.
This is not merely a health crisis. It is an economic emergency. The NHS spends an estimated £10.7 billion a year directly on diabetes — 60% on preventable complications — projected to reach £18 billion by 2035. Productivity losses from work absence, reduced capacity and premature death cost the UK economy a further £3.3 billion annually (University of York, 2024). The total burden is approaching £14 billion a year and rising.
The personal toll is equally profound. Diabetes raises the risk of amputation twentyfold. It is a leading cause of sight loss among working-age adults. People managing serious complications face significant mental health challenges, reduced quality of life and in many cases cannot sustain employment. These are the consequences of catching this disease too late.
Yet the CVRM framework contains no funded mechanism for the one digital prevention tool that could genuinely bend the curve at the metabolic stage: continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) for the 6.3 million people in the UK living with prediabetes, and the 1.3 million more with undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes.
These are precisely the ‘missing millions’ the Health Secretary said he wants to find. And when the NHS does find them — when a GP flags a borderline HbA1c and refers someone to the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme — it currently hands them generalised dietary advice and sends them home. No personalised glucose data. No real-time insight into which specific habits are driving their own individual risk. No CGM.
Dr Dawn Harper, NHS GP, knows this from her own experience: “I’m a GP with thirty years’ experience. My weight is healthy, I eat well and I exercise regularly — and last year my blood sugar crossed into the diabetic range at a routine check. I wore a continuous glucose monitor for two weeks and discovered that a single slice of bread was spiking my blood sugar into the 20’s. I would never have known that from any amount of general dietary advice. I changed one thing and my levels returned to normal.”
“The Health Secretary is right: too many people are dying from preventable conditions. But prevention without personalised data is guesswork. The NHS is asking millions of people to change their lives without giving them the tools to understand which changes actually matter for their own body. The framework exists. The partnership with Diabetes UK exists. Now we need CGM access for people on the Diabetes Prevention Programme to exist too.”
CGM for DPP participants would deliver on every priority the Health Secretary named on 7 July: earlier diagnosis, prevention, digital innovation, neighbourhood-based personalised care, and finding the missing millions. By the time most people receive a formal Type 2 diagnosis, there is roughly a 50% chance that some degree of complication — vascular or nerve damage — is already underway. The DPP population is the earliest, most cost-effective point at which to intervene. The framework is welcome. The partnership with Diabetes UK is welcome. Both need a funded mechanism to match.
