To ask the Secretary of State for Health (1) what estimate he has made of the number of black and minority ethnic people in Bradford and Airedale Primary Care Trust area who have been diagnosed with diabetes; (260850)

The information is not collected centrally.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health what steps his Department is taking to ensure that primary care trusts provide people with diabetes from black and minority ethnic communities annual retinal screening. (260852)

All eligible people with diabetes should be offered screening for diabetic retinopathy regardless of ethnicity.

The English National Screening Programme for Sight Threatening Retinopathy (NSP) has been established to support local delivery of diabetic retinopathy screening. The NSP is managing a number of initiatives to improve equality of access to screening. These include:

asking specific questions about equality as part of its external quality assurance process;

recommending health equity audits are carried out by each screening programme so that no particular group is disadvantaged; and

developing national patient information leaflets—these have undergone extensive consultation with patient groups and translation of leaflets into easy to read versions in a variety of languages have been commissioned and are being developed.

The delivery of this programme is a priority for the national health service and has been included in the last two sets of planning guidance for the NHS and retained in the planning guidance for 2009-10.