Latest update November 14th, 2024 12:12 AM
Fighting NCDs requires universal access to health care – CMO
“Being happy is synonymous with being healthy,” was the notion emphasised by Chief Medical Officer, Dr Shamdeo Persaud, when he addressed a gathering recently at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation to launch an ambitious programme to tackle chronic Non-Communicable Diseases.
Dr Shamdeo Persaud, Chief Medical Officer
In fact, according to Dr Persaud, Government through the Ministry of Health is well on its way to implementing its “health in all policies” strategy which is intended to be a national approach in addressing the challenge of NCDs. He pointed out that although the availability to health care is a human right, it is not merely about delivering medical care, although it forms a great part of the function of health care workers.
According to Dr Persaud, there is currently keen movement towards universal access to all health care services that can be available at reasonable cost to the population. In this regard, he disclosed that the Ministry of Health has chosen the platform of primary health care to achieve this objective.
He did point out that “primary health care doesn’t mean the health centres and health posts out there; primary health care is a combination of our tertiary facilities, like the Georgetown Hospital, along with a network of other level of facilities that can provide services to different target groups.”
“Captured in that whole access is the universality of that approach, and when we think about people, we are not only thinking about people who live in places that they can drive their cars or take a bus and come to a hospital…we had to think about people who are far away who may have to walk miles, maybe row a canoe. Sometimes they have to go to extremes to get to where they need to access these services,” the Chief Medical Officer highlighted.
And access, he stressed, is in fact very important, even as he noted that although “this is a nucleus that we are building here (GPHC), we hope that with the training, with the exposure, at least the knowledge and the system will be in place that persons can gain access to these facilities.”
However, although some of the common measures in the Ministry’s strategy are in fact directed towards treating the diseases, a lot of them are geared towards prevention, Dr Persaud said, as he insisted that prevention is an integral part of such a management programme.
“I think that an important point that we should now underscore as we move forward with all these advance level technologies and innovations is that we don’t neglect to recognise that prevention is very important, even for people who have diseases.”
With prevention in focus, he amplified that persons can be educated with a view to ensuring that they adopt practices that can help save their lives. As such, Dr Persaud emphasised that capacity building, training, as well as resourcing and tooling strategic services are critical measures.
Moreover, he highlighted that over the past 10 years there has been rapid developments at health facilities across the country.
“We have a brand new hospital at Lethem, one at Linden, another one at Mabaruma…surgeries are done there. In the past, we could not have attempted to do something like that. We need to probably utilise them more adequately,” Dr Persaud observed, as he noted that the local health sector will continue to make strides to improve the service delivered which will cater to combating NCDs.
According to the World Health Organisation, NCDs are known to kill more than 36 million people annually, with nearly 80 per cent of these deaths occurring in low and middle income countries.
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