Abbott’s Freestyle Libre is a transformative technology for diabetics who want to monitor their glycaemic control. Libre is a type of Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) that continuously measures interstitial glucose and stores the result in the sensor memory until it is read by the Libre reader. Often Libre is known as “flash CGM” because the data is only read from the sensor when the reader is swiped over the sensor. Other forms of CGM (called real time CGM or rtCGM) read interstitial glucose and immediately transmits the data to the remote reader.
The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is four different administered systems, with four different policies on how healthcare is provided. These four systems are based on the four nations of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland. Each is universal healthcare, in that everyone resident in each nation is entitled to healthcare (note: changes by the Coalition government of 2010 has watered down the universal aspect, but the NHS still covers the majority of the population). Each system is free-at-the-point-of-use but there are some co-pay for some people, for things like dentistry, optometrist services, and England, in particular, has co-pay for prescriptions for some people.
Each NHS system commissions services and treatments. Commissioning has the dual responsibility of ensuring that services are provided for the healthcare need in the community, while at the same time ensuring that the healthcare costs no more than the budget set by Parliament. This means that there is always some form of rationing, but by and large the NHS always provides care according to clinical need.
Scotland and Wales have Health Boards that perform the commissioning, England has organisations called Clinical Commissioning Groups, CCGs. (Northern Ireland, which is really too small to have separate commissioning organisations, has essentially a single authority as part of the Northern Ireland Executive.) This site gives the commissioning policy for Freestyle Libre agreed by these commissioning authorities. Because of its much larger population, and the more fragmented commissioning structure, most of the pages on this site will be about the policies of CCGs in England.
This site is a mixture of static pages for reference and blog pages to list more recent changes to NHS Libre policy (which in time will be reflected on the static pages). Pages of this site are available through the menu button in the top left hand corner of each page.
Libre User 