Driving progress towards better diabetes care

WHO has set ambitious goals to improve diabetes care worldwide by 2030. Countries of the WHO European Region are taking steps to measure and drive progress towards these goals.

The primary aim of the global diabetes targets is to strengthen diabetes care while ensuring equitable access to high-quality services. Achieving measurable progress towards these targets requires countries to collect reliable data across population groups and health system contexts.

The 5 global diabetes targets are:

• 80% of people with diabetes are diagnosed;
• 80% of people with diagnosed diabetes have good control of glycaemia;
• 80% of people with diagnosed diabetes have good control of blood pressure;
• 60% of people with diabetes of 40 years or older receive statins (medicines that can help to lower the level of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol in the blood); and 
• 100% of people with type 1 diabetes have access to affordable insulin and blood glucose self-monitoring.

Country experiences: using data to inform action

The WHO Regional Office for Europe worked with a first set of volunteer countries to determine how the global diabetes targets could be measured within different country contexts. This initiative led to the development of a report on the key learnings for measuring the global diabetes targets, alongside multiple in-depth country case studies.

The results are of relevance both in the WHO European Region and globally, providing transferable insight for countries on measuring progress against the global diabetes targets, including common approaches and considerations.

Some of the key lessons learned were as follows:

• there is an opportunity to use the global diabetes targets to highlight gaps in care between and within countries and to drive improvements for people living with diabetes;
• there were multiple possible approaches and data sources used to measure the targets; and
• it was also possible to meaningfully engage people living with diabetes in the use of diabetes data.