We are living in a time where governments are prioritizing policies that ensure their citizens have access to affordable health care. Indeed, even within less-resourced countries, governments are introducing Universal Health Coverage (UHC) programs aimed at eliminating the financial burden of health care for the population.<\/p>\n
At Life for a Child we aim to ensure that the needs of young people living with type 1 diabetes are included in the development of UHC programs globally.<\/strong><\/p>\n To understand the current landscape we began a study looking at national service provision, affordability, and availability of insulin and test strips in 37 less-resourced countries, and compared findings to the situation in 7 high-income countries.<\/p>\n We found that whilst some health systems are providing insulin, a proportion are not subsidizing the costs. On the whole, the situation was markedly worse for blood glucose test strips as these were not even provided in most health systems we assessed.<\/p>\n We demonstrated our results through a novel graphic approach, above you can see a table from the paper which shows patterns from the 37 less-resourced countries. Within the whole study information from seven high-income countries were included: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, UK, Sweden, Italy, and France.<\/p>\n We are hopeful that the paper\u2019s findings and discussion will foster much-needed attention towards the lack of national health system provision, affordability, and availability of insulin and test strips in Life for a Child supported countries.<\/p>\n