I've been wasting NHS money, and I never knew!

Sometimes I get annoyed at things that, if only I had known about, I could have changed. Today it's the waste of money in the NHS.

We all know that the NHS is a behemoth that has issues, mainly to do with money, but the NHS is still a great institution that no-one wants to perish, but it's spending really needs to be looked at. I am not talking about the big cash injections like the mysterious £350 million, I want the day to day small pennies to be watched.

This week I went for my yearly review with the diabetic nurse, and found out I have been wasting the NHS's money every month. If you don't know, as diabetes is a life threatening illness (type 1 - the one with insulin injections), we diabetics get our insulin and general diabetic gubbins free on the NHS. As part of the way to control our blood sugars, so we don't keel over and end up in hospital, we test our blood with a small monitor, and therefore can adjust our insulin injections.

I have been using the same monitor for over 5 years now which was given to me by the diabetic centre, and only because of an off the cuff question I discovered my testing strips cost £15.59 per pot, which is the most expensive on a NHS list I discovered when I looked it up on the internet.

I've been using a pot of these strips approximately every 25 days, more frequently if I'm ill. I found out that for all this time I could have been using a different meter (that the clinics get given free to hand out by the big companies), and the strips would be £9.95 per pot, a saving of £5.64 each time. This means that, on a conservative estimate, I could have saved the NHS around £83 per year just by switching strips, and like I said I've had this meter over 5 years so that's over  £415 lost.

That doesn't seem like much in the massive amounts that the NHS has to deal with, but with over 3 million diabetics in the UK, if the same is happening in only a percentage of the country then a lot of money is being paid out unecessarily.

As individuals we all like to have a choice, and there are a lot meters to choose from, but if we are going to continue to have a NHS that works, we need to reign in that choice to only allowing the testing strips that come within a certain budget. A lot of people don't like change, and will be in dismay at having to change meters, but if this change was made and they wish to continue with the more expensive versions then they need to pay the difference.

I have now changed my meter to the more economical version, and there is no difference to my experience of testing, so why didn't the NHS/diabetic clinic tell me about this sooner? As a diabetic this is relevant to my experience, but I can bet there is the same thing happening all throughout the NHS.

As the saying goes
'take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves'.

Thanks for reading, please write your comments below as I am really interested on your thoughts.
Karen Lee