Frequently asked questions

You have been invited to take part because your name was chosen at random from an NHS list of people living with diabetes. This is called the National Diabetes Audit (NDA). NHS England matched your name with your contact details from the list of patients registered with a GP, called the Personal Demographic Service (PDS). NHS England has shared a limited amount of your personal data so that Ipsos can invite you to take part in this research.

Over 100,000 adults, aged 18 and over, living with diabetes in England have been selected to take part in the National Diabetes Experience Survey this year. For more information about protection of your data, please see the confidentiality and data protection page.

Taking part in the survey is voluntary. We hope you will take part as this will give us the best possible picture of people’s experience of living with diabetes in England. But if you choose not to take part, it will not affect your care and you don’t need to give us a reason.

Text messages are sent as reminders to take part in the survey, where mobile numbers are available. Each text message contains a unique link. This will allow you to take part online without needing to enter your personal access code.

We send reminder mailings to encourage people to take part in the survey. This helps us to make sure that the survey results are representative of the people we’ve invited to take part. For example, we know that there are differences in the demographics of people who take part immediately and people who take part after being sent a reminder.

We try hard to make sure reminders are not sent to people who have already taken part, but due to the scale of the project, the printing and postage deadlines mean that we have to start printing reminder questionnaires in advance of sending them. If you have received a reminder but have already taken part in the survey, please feel free to ignore it.

Your answers are put together with other people’s to provide results for all people living with diabetes. They will be kept confidential. Nobody will be able to identify you in any published results. No one involved in your care will know who has responded to the survey. More information about how your data will be used can be found on the confidentiality and data protection page.

If you do not want to receive reminders about this survey, please contact the Ipsos survey helpline on Freephone 0800 470 2983 between 10am and 4pm Monday to Saturday. Or you can email Ipsos at diabetessurvey@ipsos.com.

Please be ready to provide your access code, which you can find on the front of the invitation letter. If you do not have an access code, we will be able to remove you from reminders using your name and postcode.

If you do not want to be selected to take part in the survey in future, NHS England will securely store your NHS number to make sure that you are not selected again.

Yes, you can still take part. People living with type 1 or type 2 diabetes have been invited to take part in the survey. However, most questions are about your general experiences of living with diabetes and how you manage it as well as the care you have received.

Yes, you can still take part. We are interested in hearing about your experience of living with diabetes. If a question does not apply you can leave it blank. We have also included instructions to help you avoid answering questions which are not relevant to you.