MHS8432 Health Promotion

Answer

Challenges in addressing non-communicable diseases

Non-communicable diseases are a group of infections or conditions that cannot spread from one person to another. Examples of such diseases include diabetes and hypertension. Since this diseases contributes to mortality and morbidity rates, there should be efforts both nationally and globally to prevent and manage them. However, there are different challenges experienced in the quest to reduce their prevalence. Ageing population is one of the leading challenges in addressing non-communicable diseases. Ageing is a natural process of advancement in the number of years and it is proving to be a stumbling block in reducing the prevalence of non-communicable diseases. Different studies attribute non-communicable diseases to cumulative exposure to risk factors such as tobacco smoking over a lifetime .This therefore implies that the larger the proportion of the ageing population, the higher the prevalence of non-communicable diseases. Since ageing cannot be controlled, it becomes quite difficult to control the non-communicable diseases.

Inadequate cheap medications for non-communicable diseases contributes to difficulties in reducing their prevalence. According to an article by Crino et.al there is a global shortage of cheap drugs that can be used to treat different non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular diseases (Crino, Sacks, & Wu, 2016). This is a very serious challenge especially in middle and low-income countries. This has in return forced the patients to use out of pocket payment which is not conducive to all of them and this has therefore made it difficult to combat the non-communicable diseases.

Inadequate data or statistics about non-communicable diseases as well as surveillance of the risk factors is another challenge in the prevention and management of the non-communicable diseases. One of the studies conducted by Sharma et al., established that optimal monitoring of the different risk factors, morbidity and mortality of this type of diseases and finally the health systems responses have not been incorporated into the national health information systems of different countries (Sharma et al., 2017). The study found out that in some other countries, the capacity as well as resources that can be used in collecting data and supporting surveillance systems are generally limited. Non communicable diseases contributes to high mortality and morbidity rates globally and there should be efforts to overcome those challenges and reduce both the mortality and mortality rates as a result of non-communicable diseases.

References

Crino, M., Sacks, G., & Wu, J. H. (2016). A Review of Population-Level Actions Targeting Reductions in Food Portion Sizes to Address Obesity and Related Non-communicable Diseases. Current Nutrition Reports, 5(4), 323-332. doi:10.1007/s13668-016-0181-7

Sharma, S. R., Page, R., Matheson, A., Lambrick, D., Faulkner, J., & Mishra, S. R. (2017). Non-communicable disease prevention in Nepal: systemic challenges and future directions. Global Health Promotion, 175797591772080. doi:10.1177/1757975917720800