Frequently asked questions

2024 results were published on 10 December 2024.

You can access the results here.

Integrated Care Systems (ICS) are partnerships between the organisations delivering health and social care in a geographical area, working to plan and coordinate services to improve population health and reduce inequalities between different groups of people.

There are 42 ICS covering all parts of England. Find your local ICS here.

For more information about ICSs, visit: NHS England

Many of the National Diabetes Experience Survey outputs show summary results – statistics that provide a quick way of viewing the result for a question. For example, we might use ‘Useful’ to describe a combination of the ‘Very useful’ and ‘Fairly useful’ response options, as is shown in the Summary Results section in the Technical Annex. The individual response options are available to view in the National results tables, for National level data, or the ICS tables, for ICS level data.

For some questions it is not appropriate to present a summary result; for instance, where it is more useful to look at the responses individually and there is not a particular answer that suggests a more (or less) positive experience. An example of this is Q4 ‘Which of the following describes how you were diagnosed with diabetes?’. 

Suppression is used to prevent individuals and their responses being identifiable in the data, and to ensure results based on very small numbers of respondents are not released.

Two levels of suppression have been applied to the data from the National Diabetes Experience Survey. In cases where a result is based on fewer than 10 responses, the result has been suppressed, and results will not appear within the charts. In addition, where fewer than 10 individuals in total have selected a specific response option for a question, this response has been suppressed for all sub-groups; and in the case of questions about the individual (Q41-Q50) the total response has also been suppressed.

This can happen when weighted data is rounded to a whole number.

When weights are applied, decimals are added to the number of responses in each category and the total number of responses. This means that sometimes there can be cases where the number of responses is different from the base size. For example, if a report says that 59 people say ‘yes’ and 14 say ‘no’, but the number of responses is 74 (not 73). This means that the weighted values could actually be 59.345 and 14.456, which add up to 73.801 (which is then rounded up to 74).

There are examples in the reports where, for example, it looks like one person has selected 'Other' and one person selected 'I would prefer not to say'. However, their corresponding percentages are 1% and 2%. Again, this happens when the results and number of responses are rounded but the percentages are calculated on un-rounded data.

The ICS data tables and ICS PowerPoint reports include significance testing to help demonstrate where a difference between two results is genuine, rather than down to chance. Significance is tested using a two-sample t-test.

In the ICS data tables, this is shown by the word “higher” or “lower” to compare the ICS result to the national result. In the ICS PowerPoint reports, this is shown by an up or down arrow. When the change is not statistically significant, the column is left blank. For both outputs, the significance testing has only been applied to the ICS result and the national result.

Weighting changes the data to account for differences between all people living with diabetes and the sub-set of people living with diabetes who actually took part in the survey.

If a lower proportion of a demographic group with type 1 diabetes returned questionnaires than the proportion of the same demographic group with type 1 diabetes in the whole of England, this group would be under-represented in the survey results. A ‘weight’ for responses can be calculated by dividing the national proportion by the response proportion. Responses from the demographic group are then multiplied by the weight to increase the influence of these responses in the final results, to make up for the low representation.

So, for example, if the proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds with type 1 diabetes who responded to the survey was 5% and the actual proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds with type 1 diabetes in England was 10%, the weight would be worked out by dividing the national proportion (10%) by the response proportion (5%) and then multiplying the responses from 18 to 24-year-olds by the weight (2.0). A weight of less than 1 will occur when there is a higher proportion of responses than the national proportion. This will decrease the influence of these responses in the final results. Please note, the figures in this example are for demonstration purposes only and do not reflect the number of people living with type 1 diabetes in England.

This example only uses age as a factor when deciding the weight. The weighting scheme for the National Diabetes Experience Survey includes many factors such as diabetes type, age, gender and geo-demographic classification (ACORN). These are used alongside other area level factors such as: the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) score, ethnicity, marital status, overcrowding in households, household tenure and employment status.

For further details on weighting please see the Technical Annex here.

All published National Diabetes Experience Survey outputs present weighted results. Weighting ensures results are better reflective of the population of adults aged 18+ who are living with diabetes (as not all people living with diabetes are invited to take part and not all of those who are invited returned a survey). Weighted data is useful for organisations where fewer people living with diabetes of a certain group (for example, younger people) have filled in the survey than we would expect.

Unweighted base sizes are presented, alongside weighted base sizes, in most outputs to provide transparency on the actual number of patients who answered a question.