England’s diabetes prevention program as a blueprint for Canada

Canada can learn from England’s successful diabetes prevention program to build its own programs to tackle diabetes prevention across the country, argue the authors in an analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

In 2022, Canada released a diabetes framework that calls on provincial and Indigenous governing bodies to build community-based programs to help address increases in new cases of diabetes.

Based on evidence showing positive preventive benefits of diet and exercise for type 2 diabetes, England’s National Health Service (NHS) created prevention and remission programs that have been successful. The initiative has reduced diabetes rates from 64.3 to 53.4 per 1,000 person-years in people with prediabetes and is projected to save $121 million over 35 years.

A Quebec-based team of clinician–scientists, legal experts, and health economist researchers have partnered with leaders from the NHS to investigate whether a similar program could be rolled out in Quebec. The idea is to start in Quebec and trigger action in other parts of Canada. It would be akin to what happened with Quebec’s early child education and care program, which Canada’s federal government has adopted to deliver similar programs across the country.

“Our goal is to build successful programs in Quebec that will catalyze programs across Canada,” writes Dr. Kaberi Dasgupta, Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center, Montréal, Quebec, with co-authors.

“In our view, if one province successfully builds a program, it will catalyze others and attract federal funding.”

As another example of change in one part of the country leading to change in other parts, Medicare, which was originally a provincial initiative in Saskatchewan, was rolled out nationally and is the basis of Canada’s publicly funded health systems.