New Zealand is lagging behind other Western countries in funding life-saving blood sugar monitoring devices for diabetics that don’t require a pinprick, experts say.
Continuous glucose monitoring devices are funded in Australia, the UK and Canada. Paediatrician and diabetes specialist Ben Wheeler wants the devices, which particularly help children, to be funded here.
Eddie Writes, 8, is able to monitor his diabetes with a sensor and monitor.
Nearly 30,000 people have signed a petition urging the Government to better fund the glucose monitors.
“Diabetes is the most chronic illness children experience after asthma,” Wheeler told the health select committee on Wednesday. “The current situation in New Zealand with no funding leads to considerable inequity. I think that is unacceptable.”
There are an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people in New Zealand living with type 1 diabetes.
The testing devices that are currently funded require them to prick their finger before driving, exercising and before and after meals to monitor their blood, as well as overnight. Those that don’t manage their diabetes they run the risk of complications which can lead to blindness, amputations and kidney disease.
“Finding their child unresponsive in the morning is something all families fear,” Wheeler said.
The monitors which work using a sensor cost between $50 to $80 a week and were an “essential part of the fight against diabetes particularly, in type 1 diabetes”, he said.
That wasn’t too big of a leap from the funded pinprick devices, which cost $35 a week, he added.
“They are funded in Australia and in all other western countries.”
Eddie Writes, an 8-year-old from Ōwhiro Bay in Wellington, said it was “the best day of his life” when his parents bought him a monitor. He had started using his toes for the pinprick test, after a year of using his fingers.
“It hurt so much,” he said.
He has a sensor on the back of his arm from which he can get a reading of his blood sugar levels and an indication whether they are going to go up or down.
It meant he came second in his school’s cross-country race this year, because he didn’t have to stop halfway through to prick his finger.
Diabetes New Zealand chief executive Heather Verry said people who struggled to manage their diabetes ended up in hospital up to six times a year for weeks at a time, which cost the health system about $80,000 per person.
The petition had called for the devices to be funded for type 1 diabetics but they could also be used for the more than 250,000 people with type 2 diabetes, she said.