NATIONAL COMMISSION ON NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES INTRODUCED

March 10, 2010

This morning Minister of Health Pablo Marin officially launched the Belize National Commission on Non-Communicable Diseases. The formation of the Commission is to keep the Ministry’s health and wellness initiatives with Belize’s obligations under the CARICOM Heads of Government. Love News spoke with Minister Marin.

Pablo Marin; Minister of Health

“The purpose of the commission is to have a healthier Belize and we have already shown that there are a lot of non-communicable diseases that can be preventable. Obesity is one of them. With obesity you have hypertension and we have kidney problems. We have to do this commission for us to target and to teach the people exactly what to do. That is why the commission is a broad area of technical people; we have sport, agriculture, doctors and the chair of this commission is my DHS on my behalf so we can know what is happening and how we are going along with it. We are seeing a lot of young people with kidney problems so the way to fight this is not only getting all the doctors and the medication but there is something else that can be done. They can stop drinking soft drink, exercise and other healthy behavior will be promoted and like what I am going to do next week is have no smoking signs in all public places. That is very essential because if you are a non-smoker you can catch cancer from inhaling second hand smoke. Once we can stop this it will help us also to use our resources somewhere else and that is the main objective.”

Also the Ministry of Health in Collaboration with the Pan American Health Organization is hosting a 2 day workshop on “Diabetes Quality of Care Project”. The main objective of the workshop will be to introduce the Chronic Care Model as a tool to address the quality of care for diabetes in Belize and to develop interventions based on the Chronic Care Model to address issues of quality of care identified in health facilities. Loraine Thompson is the Technical Advisor for PAHO.

Loraine Thompson; Technical Advisor, PAHO

“The whole idea of the two day workshop is to focus on quality of care for diabetes. As we all are aware the prevalence of diabetes in Belize is very high; it is 13.1 percent among people over 20 years of age. This means that it is very high when we compare ourselves to other countries but what it also means is that if we do not institute quality of care and ensure good management and care of diabetes we are going to see a lot of complications in the future. We are already seeing a lot of complications that result from diabetes. These include; kidney failure, blindness and nerve damage which results in amputation. If you can work with health care settings and ensure that there is very good management of the diabetes that is kept under control, doing all the patient education, foot care. You might be aware that along with that the other disease that goes along with diabetes is hypertension. If there is good blood pressure management then a patient can have a longer life. The focus of the workshop over the next two days is to work with health care professional’s from all over the country for them to access their quality of care as it stands now. We are going to be using a tool called the chronic care model that will be used to look at their settings and go back and then improve the quality of care to ensure that when the patients get the health facilities they get the health care they need in order to manage their blood sugar properly as well as their blood sugar. We are also promoting good foot care in terms of healthy lifestyles. That is the objective of the workshop.”

The workshop will be facilitated by international and local health care providers.

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