In collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
India has been going through a major epidemiological
transition over the past 25 years. The burden of premature death and health
loss due to NCDs and non-infectious conditions remains unacceptably high. The
extent of this burden is expected to vary appreciably across the various
population groups and states in India. The national level estimates fail to
provide enough insights and data to contemplate a targeted action. Hence a sub
national, region specific estimation of disease burden is essential for India
in order to develop an informed health system response to improve the
population’s health.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the Public
Health Foundation of India (PHFI) and the Institute of Health Metrics and
Evaluation (IHME) under the aegis of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare,
Government of India have launched a collaborative initiative on state level
disease estimation in India. This effort would extensively employ the robust
methods of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, developed by a global
network of researchers coordinated by IHME. This will help in generating
rigorous estimates of all major drivers of health loss at the state level in
India. This would also include the state-of-the-art GBD interactive
visualisation tools which would help bring to life the initiative’s findings.
India has a vast landscape with tremendous regional health
variations. Well researched estimations can enable the government to adopt a
more targeted approach and help decide what needs to be done where, for whom
and when. As rightly identified by Prof.Lalit Dandona, who will serve as the
Director of the joint initiative, many Indian states are bigger than most
countries in the world. Planning effective health improvements for one sixth of
the world’s population without taking into consideration the variation in
disease burden trends across the states cannot yield optimal outcomes. This
collaborative effort of the state level disease burden initiative, is a unique
opportunity that would help generate better evidence for the disease trend
variation across India and also help developing useful data generation systems
to aid in effective health planning on an ongoing basis at local levels in
India.
This initiative would work closely with a network of academic
partners across India, and primarily with policy makers at the national and
state level for guidance and utilization of the findings to improve health
programs and planning.
The contribution of risk factors such as high blood pressure,
blood sugar and cholesterol, and that of poor diet and alcohol use, to health
loss has doubled in India over the past two decades, and air pollution and
tobacco smoking continue to be major contributors to health loss. However, the
extent of these risk factors varies considerably across the states of India.
The efforts of the State-level Disease Burden Initiative would help refine the
understanding of these variations across India, which would in turn form
appropriate strategies for the different states of Indiaas well as aid in the improvement
of systems to produce these estimates on an ongoing basis to monitor changing
trends at the local levels.
No comments:
Post a Comment