Diabetes Mellitus
In patients with diabetes the most important thing to do is to prevent damage to areas such as heart, kidneys, eyes and skin. The best ways to do this are to keep the blood sugar and blood pressure under tight control. We are aiming to get HbA1c (a measure of sugar control) to 6.5 or below, the systolic BP to 135 or below and the diastolic BP to 75 or below.
The traditional way of assessing how well we do this is to measure the numbers of people with diabetes who fall below these targets but that doesn't show how many are close to the targets and how many are dangerously far off. This is a different way of monitoring progress.
Click on a graph to see it full size.
HbA1c
HbA1c indicates how good sugar control has been over the previous 3 months. Our target was 7.5 until 2006 when we reduced it to 6.5. we raised it to 7.5 again in 2010 after new evidence showed that control that was too tight could be harmful!
This graph indicates how many of our diabetic patients are how close to this target.
The ideal would be to see all the lines moving closer together and nearer to 7.5%. This is happening but very slowly! We clearly have a group of patients (about 25%) whose diabetes is difficult to control.
Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP)
Diastolic Blood Pressure (DBP)
Diastolic BP is easier to control than systolic BP so the median line is heading steadily towards the target and all lines are heading downwards.
Notes on Interpretation
50% of people had their latest reading below the median (yellow) line, and 50% above it.
25% of people had their latest reading below the 25 percentile (turquoise) line, and 75% were above it
98% of people had their latest reading below the 98 percentile (dark blue) line, and just 2% were above it, and so on....
More than 98% of diabetics have their HbA1c and their BP measured in the last year so the graphs provide a very good picture of our performance over the years.
